More Helpful Tips.

Here's a few interesting items you might want to know about brushes. There's more to brushes than just stamping them on an image or scribbling about with them. Photoshop has a few ways to customize the way a brush draws. Please note that my explanations are for photoshop 6 but I'm sure there are similar ways of achieving these "tricks" in older versions of PS.

Drawing a straight line:
By holding the shift button down and moving the brush either horizontally or vertically you will get a horizontal line or vertical one, respectively. If you draw one line, and immediately try to draw another one, you will get a horizontal line connecting the two lines... To avoid that, before drawing the next straight line, click anywhere outside the picture, then draw the next straight line.

Spacing:
Spacing is a great way to get something new out of an old brush.

For this demonstration I have chosen the following brush out of my "andro" set (November 9 archives).

If you just click on the selected brush on the brush toolbar a small menu will open. In this menu you will have a sliding bar under the category "spacing". Slide the bar so that the spacing will be 1%   (fig. 1).

Now, while holding the shift button down, draw a straight vertical line. The difference between the custom (25%) spacing and the 1% spacing is displayed below (fig.2).

Brush Dynamics:
Another interesting way to make brush-using more interesting.

On the right side of the brush menu you should see the following botton:

When you first click it this is the menu you'll receive (fig.4):

Now start playing with the settings. In Fig. 5 you see settings I'd chosen for each of the categories, but truly it's all up to you if you want to have all three categories on at once, or just one or two and of course how many steps you'd like to fade.

Finally, using the above mentioned settings, you can see the difference in what you can do with the same brush with the dynamics on. In both cases I held the shift buttons down and used 1% spacing while I drew a vertical line. The dynamics make the difference (fig.6):

Before I go, let me note that not all brushes can be used with these settings, but some brushes are just about "born" for spacing and dynamic play - check out the "andro", "boxy" & "boxy2" sets for instance.

Enjoy! and hope you had a good time.