Making Brushes

This tutorial is reprinted with permission of it's author, Joe Cilinceon. Thanks Joe!

Custom brush tips greatly increase the flexibility of Paint Shop Pro. Many of the free brushes available for Photoshop 4 will work with Paint Shop Pro 5. It is also very easy to create your own from any object/texture you can select.

I will demonstrate creating a custom brush tip using the leaf picture in Fig. 1. First thing you do is open the leaf image and select the magic wand tool from the tool bar. Now set the wand tool's controls to color = RGB, tolerance = 15, feather = 0. Once this is set click the wand on any spot on the white background.
Leaf
Fig. 1

Now do a Selections | Invert and you should now have what I have in Fig. 2.

Fig 2
Fig. 2
We will now create the custom tip from this leaf selection. First select your brush tool from the tool bar and make sure the control palette is visible. On the control palette click on the brush tip tab and click on the brush options button and select custom. Now just select create and OK your bush tip is done. The finished product will create effects as shown in Fig. 3.
Fig 3
Fig. 3
Just be aware that brushes can become as addictive as plugin filters.

This page reposted by permission, Joe Cilinceon April 2002

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