Painting - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Essentials - page 110

Using the Mixer brush

The Mixer brush is the closest a Photoshop tool gets to a real paintbrush. As the
name suggests, you can mix paint that's already on the canvas with any percent-
age of fresh pigment, and blend colors to add to your canvas. In the following
steps you will use the Mixer brush to transform the photograph you were working
on in the previous section into a fine art painting.

Certification
Objective

1. Reopen the photo Mountain Freedom.jpg .

2. Create a new layer by pressing Shift+Cmd+N. Type Moist Unloaded in
the Name dialog box and click OK.

3. Select the Mixer brush from the flyout under the Brush tool. On the
options bar, select the Spatter 46 px brush from the Brush Preset
drop-down. Deselect Load The Brush After Each Stroke and select
the Clean The Brush After Each Stroke button. Choose Moist, Light
Mix from the drop-down menu and select Sample All Layers. Select
the Tablet Pressure Controls Size button if you are using a tablet.

4. Paint over the silhouette of the mountain range. Paint over the rocks
in the mountains such that your brushstrokes follow the striations in
the rock. Paint vertical strokes over the trees near the lake and horizon-
tal strokes at the edge of the water. Continue painting, being sensitive to
the natural directions of the surfaces you are tracing. The pixels of the
photo are treated as moist paint that you are pushing around like oil on
a canvas.

5. Create a new layer by pressing Shift+Cmd+N. Type Loaded Heavy Mix
in the Name dialog box and click OK.

6. Click the Current Brush Load drop-down on the options bar to open
the color picker. Type the hex color b878fe in the # text box and click
OK to select a deep-purple hue.

7. Select the Load The Brush After Each Stroke button and deselect the
Clean The Brush After Each Stroke button. Increase Load to 100% and
Mix to 90%. Now the brush will always be full of purple paint and you
will mix 90% of the existing pigment with 10% purple as you paint.