Photoshop Brushes, Patterns

So far in our look at Photoshop’s powerful and amazing Brush Dynamics, we’ve seen how we can dynamically control the size, angle and roundness of our brushes as we paint using the options found in the section of the Brushes panel, and how we can scatter multiple copies of our brush tip along each stroke with the Scattering options.

In this tutorial, we’ll look at the Texture options, which give us the ability to add a texture to our brush, perfect for creating the illusion of painting on a textured surface like paper or canvas, or just for adding more interest to the shape of our brush tip!

To access the Texture options, click directly on the word Texture on the left side of the Brushes panel. Just as with the Shape Dynamics and Scattering sections that we looked at previously, we need to click on the word itself to gain access to the options. the name will turn the Texture options on but won’t let us change any of them:

Once you’ve clicked on the word Texture, the Texture options will appear on the right side of the Brushes panel. By default, the bottom half of the options are grayed out and unavailable. We’ll see how to enable them a bit later on:

The Texture options. Only the top half of the options are available at first.

Choosing A Texture

Even though Photoshop calls them Texture options, what you’ll usually be working with here is patterns, and we can use any of the patterns that Photoshop installed for us, as well as any patterns we’ve created ourselves. To choose a pattern, click on the pattern preview thumbnail at the top of the list of options:

This opens the Pattern Picker, which shows small thumbnail previews of all the patterns that are currently loaded into Photoshop. By default, there isn’t much to choose from. That’s because all we see are the patterns that Photoshop initially loads for us, but there are other pattern sets available. To load any of the additional pattern sets that Photoshop comes with, click on the small triangle icon in the top right corner of the Pattern Picker:

To load additional pattern sets, click on the small triangle icon.