CUSTOM BRUSHES
You can push further than the stock brushes and create your own. There is a lot you can do when you modify the attributes of the stock brushes, and you can come up with an amazing assortment of looks that are much more painterly or at least nonround. It takes a lot of time to experiment, so make sure to set someone on this task early on in your group project. If you are doing a solo project, that someone is you.
When you create custom brushes, the brush shape is based on a grayscale image. Complete black areas will fully deliver paint to the canvas, gray areas will deliver a varying degree of paint, and white areas will not paint. The brush attributes can be applied to your custom brush tip.
How do you make that black-and-white image? You can paint it in Photoshop, scan in an image, or create it in Illustrator or a similar program.
Here’s an example of creating a custom brush:
1. Create the desired brush tip shape in Illustrator and save.
2. Open that file in Photoshop.
3. Click Edit > Define Brush Preset…. This creates a brush from that image.
4. Tweak the parameters until you get the desired results.
FIGURE 4.28 Using an Illustrator file to create a custom Photoshop brush.
DOWNLOADING BRUSHES
Of course, why reinvent the wheel? There are an amazing number of brushes waiting for you to download. In just doing a quick search for the group project, I found more brushes than I could ever test in one session. For example, I ran across a brush website: myphotoshopbrushes.com. Though there were many sets of brushes that I could have looked at, I focused more on traditional media brushes and ran across this set called Dukal’s Artistic Brushes by Alex Dukal. You can find these brushes at http://myphotoshopbrushes.com/brushes/id/248.
I downloaded these brushes and found that they were at a very high resolution, meaning the brushes were huge and contained a lot of detail. You can scale the brushes down to do detailed work and, of course, use them as large sweeping brushes as well. I then took a look at Alex Dukal’s website to see what type of work he does with these brushes (www.circografico.com.ar). Lovely work. Figure 4.29 shows the Dukal brushes loaded into Photoshop and one quick use of brush “Splat 2."
FIGURE 4.29 Dukal’s artistic brushes.
Alex Dukal.
Areas of interest: Childrens Illustrations.
What can you do with brushes like these? Figure 4.30 is an illustration by Dukal using his Photoshop brushes. This originated as a doodle on a Post-it note. The background is scanned-in mag paper. The brushes he used were his collection of Artistic Brushes #2.
FIGURE 4.30 Alex Dukal’s Chick of the Year.
I didn’t search for it, but I would bet there is a downloadable brush set of coffee stains or stains in general. I’ll have to put that onto my to-do list for looking up or creating. Can you imagine it? I could put coffee stains on all of my lecture notes or PowerPoint slides.
OR CLEAN UP IN TOON BOOM
Another package that you might use to do cleanup is Toon Boom. This package might be a little pricey for a student, but it is worth it.
In Figure 4.32 you see the x-sheet at the bottom of the screen. The keyframes that were drawn in Photoshop have been brought into one level and a drawing level has been placed above the keys.
To get a tapered line in Toon Boom, you will need to adjust the settings for the pen tool. See Figure 4.31a for an example. A range between a minimum of 0 and maximum of something of your choice will vary the thickness of the line. The attribute smoothing will try to auto adjust your line. The higher the number, the more it believes you cannot draw and will try to draw for you.
FIGURE 4.31a Animation brought into Toon Boom for inbetweens and cleanup.
For some this is a bonus, for others it is a major annoyance. Bring that setting down as low as you need to for sanity. Another thing you might notice directly off the bat is that the line seems jagged when you draw. This is a vector line and you are only seeing a quick screen representation. You will have to render or hit CTRL plus the ENTER key to see the real line as shown in Figure 4.31b.
FIGURE 4.31b Cleanup line in the jagged preview.
FIGURE 4.31c Cleanup line in the final render view.
FINAL RENDER
We’ll use After Effects to composite the different levels together. Later on in this topic, we’ll use a node-based compositor to see the difference in how you approach a scene.
Let’s review the levels that we have starting from the back to the front. Refer to Figure 4.32. The bottom level is a background, which was painted in Photoshop. The next level up is the character level, which is composed of both the ink and the paint level. These levels could be separated into two levels. With them separate, there are more compositing tricks that you can do with the ink lines. Next, there is the 3D arm level, which also has both the ink and paint together. Above those is the RGB version of the Rim Light level. It is important to remember that we are seeing an RGB image of a matte and not looking at an alpha channel. (One is inverted from the other.) Lastly, we have a table level, which is titled underlay/overlay. It has this title because it lays over most everything but also “lays” under Jam’s elbows.
FIGURE 4.32 Levels that need to be composited together and a final composited image.
