Help
However, as I noticed the quality of my coloring pieces remained rather flat and my yearning to actually replicate the feel and texture of a real blending paintbrush I finally decided to just open up the brush editors and give it a whirl. The result was better than I expected and now I understand much of the advice I had been reading.
Well in order to ease that process for those of you who are also enthusiasts and are delving into digital art on the fly I have written this for you.
Please note that this covers only Sketchbook Pro, however, a lot of these brush concepts also work on other programs with brush editors though the nomenclature might be different the results will be roughly the same.
*Note: I am assuming you know how to access your brush creation tools, I am just going to jump right into the edit window*
Once you have created a new brush an icon should appear in your tool set indicating that the brush is “raw” with the default line and grader icon. Go ahead and select that icon then click on brush properties. This will open up a rather large window with a ton of options that can be bewildering if you are seeing these things for the first time. (believe me I was confused, being firmly entrenched in traditional tools I had no clue what I was looking at).
I will tell you what these parameters do here so you don’t have to fumble around too much with way too much trial and error but rather just actual tuning of the brush you need, want to make.
The first set of parameters is the Size and Opacity parameters. These do what they say but I will give you some hints here so you can get brushes looking more or less like their real counterparts. First Size with Pen Pressure.
Size with Pen Pressure
Size with Pen Pressure does what it says, as you apply pressure the ink/color footprint on the page increases and as you weaken pressure applied to your drawing surface your ink/color footprint on the page begins to ease off and the line becomes finer and finer.
To achieve a realistic brush stroke for any of your tools be they pencils or airbrushes leave the bottom size setting (Size with Light Pen Pressure) to 0.1 (the finest setting). You can then alter the size with heavy pen pressure to your needs but by leaving the light pen pressure size at 0.1 you ensure your strokes start and end at fine points. Of course now that you understand that, you can alter that for specific brushes that you may want to start the strokes off with at something larger than a point.
Opacity with Pen Pressure
Again, this does what it says. How deep/dark do you want the color of your brushes to be as you apply pressure to your pen? Do you want it to be consistently deep no matter how much pressure you put to the drawing surface? Do you want it to be always light? Do you want it to react to pressure such that colors deepen as you apply pressure and lighten as you let up on pressure?
For inking brushes and pencils with variable line weights (thickness) you may want to keep the opacity at full no matter the pressure applied. This ensures nice bold lines of any color you want to draw in.
For blending brushes it becomes much harder to determine what the setting would be as each piece you draw will have different needs depending on the roundness/flatness and depth of color you want to achieve with your blending, but for starters I recommend an opacity level of 0.58 for HEAVY pen pressure and 0.1 for LIGHT pressure.
Fiddle with setting by putting down a few clean strokes with varying pressure as you make that stroke and get a feel for how it will mimic “blending” like a real brush. I’ll throw some pointers at the end to give you an idea of how to further blend with different tools but for now that is all I have to say on Opacity.
Brush Advance Properties
This is where you get to play with the actual footprint appearance and brush orientation. You will have to play with these when making brushes you think you may have a use for or need for specific pieces. So I am just going to give you a run down of what these things mean so you can get a good idea of what your brush will turn out like.
Aspect
Do you want your brush to fan out narrowly or broadly? Do you want it to plop right down on the page as though you draw from 90 degrees flat to your surface? Aspect will allow you to set the broadness of the brush face. The right most setting or max on the slider is the flattest possible. As you curve lines you may notice jaggies crop up, adjust the aspect to minimize or increase this effect. Aspect relies heavily on your brush size and opacity so fiddle around around until your brush face feels just right.
Rotation
Which way do you want your brush to face? Should it lean against your stroke grain or roll with it? Which effect do you need? Rotation will help you adjust this parameter to your needs. So again fiddle with it until you get a rotation angle that is just right for you.
Stamp spacing
This is very important for blending brushes. A high stamp pacing is good for non continuous and varying opacity lines. But awful for clean stroke blending. A near 0 value on stamping means your brush cannot detect or perform fine stroke movements that leave some areas of color lighter and other darker as per your opacity and pressure settings. For clean blending brush work I recommend a setting of 0.9. You may do better with less or need more broken up stamping for a particular effect or blending trick. Fiddle about and test it.
Space Noise
This relates to your Stamp Spacing. Remember this is software it thinks you are making a 1000 point drops interconnect to make a line (stamps next to stamps next to stamps etc). The Space noise will make it such that your brush strokes seems to jump from stamp to stamp. So one dot here one dot there and some space of emptiness between them rather than one continuous line. This is all very handy if you want to make effects with shapes and figures but not so good for blending. For blending keep this puppy at the lowest value of the slider. For effects move the slider to the right until you get the space between stamps you need.
Rotation Jitter
this basically determines the “age” of your brush. Is it so old it is puffy from over use and colors wisp around the edges? Is it so dry and unused that the footprint looks crackly uneven and haphazard? The jitter allows you to adjust for these real world conditions to a degree. For blending keep it to the lowest setting. For special tricks and textures which is what this will essentially create fiddle with it till you get one that is just right for your piece or art or your general art style.
Wetness
This applies only to markers and some marker-esque pens. The wetness is just that. Do you want your markers to have a brand new color dump capacity? Or do you want them to have an aged very light and nearly dry look? If you are good with marker coloring you will love this setting, as some marker effects are achieved with nearly dry and spent marker color and other vivid and almost sloppy child-like effects are best left to fully moist and ready marker effects. Fiddle until you find the setting that is just right for what you need.
Brush Texture
This is a very advanced tool, but suffice to say, it is your easy out, though you would still need to fiddle with opacity and size this tool allows you to import a texture from another file by using capture. Or you can make your own texture or shape (you might want a flower petal or a rose silhouette. Well just draw one of those on your canvas and then capture that image. Your brush will now put down and exact replica of that shape or texture all the time, in fine spacing wide spacing or continuously depending on your stamp spacing.
Final Blending Tip
For the final blending trick, I wholly recommend using the stock airbrush, selecting a midtone color to the piece you have colored, lowering the opacity to about 15% and fine tuning where different colors meet in your piece. This will allow for the best possible blending and it is also the simplest way to finish off a piece.
There you have it. Don’t be afraid to experiment until you have a set of markers, brushes, pencils, airbrushes and erasers that work well for your art style or fit the needs of a piece you are working on.
Here is a piece I managed with my new fangled blending brush:
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This post has been edited by Basukesu: 04 October 2011 - 03:28 AM
