Making Photoshop Brushes

Introduction To Brush Making
Before you get started making special brushes, you need to know how to make them, and where to find them. This tutorial is for Photoshop 6.0, but may still help you out if you have something newer or older.

How To Make A Brush

1. Open Photoshop.
2. Start a new document (any size will do). I made mine 100 x 100 pixels, 72 resolution, RGB mode with a transparent background.
3. Since all brushes are monochrome, I usually stick with a white background (or transparent), and use black for my brush color.
4. In the new document, draw anything. You can use the rectangle tool to make a black box if you like.
5. Go to Edit > Define Brush. You can name it if you like. Click "OK".
6. Now when you click the brush tool, and look in your brush menu, your new brush will be at the bottom. To delete the brush, right click and select "delete".

Saving A Set Of Brushes
Once you have a whole set of brushes that you would like to save, click the brush tool then click the drop down menu in the options palette...

...So you can get rid of any unwanted brushes. To delete a brush, right-click on one, and select "Delete Brush".

When your entire set is how you want it, click the circular button to the right of the drop down menu...

...And select Save Brushes.

Before you name it, take note of where you are on the computer. This is the location of your brushes, you may need to know this, if you ever want to upload some downloaded brushes. For example, Adobe made the location of my brushes:

C Drive > Program Files > Adobe > Photoshop 6.0 > Presets > Brushes

I know this because if you click on the drop down menu next to "Save In:".....

...you can see the path to the "Brushes" folder.

If you like to install new brushes, record this path for future reference.

Getting back to saving the brush, when you selected "save brushes", you can input the name of the set in the dialog box, and next time you load Photoshop, your set will be there.

Accessing New Brushes
Note: You need to restart Photoshop to access freashly downloaded brushes.

1. Click the Brush Tool.
   
   
   
   
2. Click the drop down menu in the options palette.
   
   
   
   
3. Click the right slide out menu.
   
   
   
   
4. The different brushes will be named "something.abr". Select the desired file to load the brushes.
5. Click "OK" or "Append". OK means that the brush file you selected will replace the brushes you currently have, and append means that you will add those brushes to the current ones.

Loading New Brushes
You can do this one of two ways, you can start Photoshop and go to "Load Brushes...", or, you can do this:

1. First you need the path to the "Brushes" folder.
   • Usually this is located at "C Drive > Program Files > Adobe > Photoshop 6.0 > Presets > Brushes", but in case yours isn't, pretend that you are going to save a brush (see above). Where it says "Save In:", click the drop-down menu. This shows you the path to the Brushes folder. For example, mine says:
     
     
     
     This means I can access my brushes by going to the Desktop > Clicking "My Computer" > Local Disk (C:) > Program Files > Adobe > Photoshop 6.0 > Presets > Brushes.
2. In the brushes folder, place the .abr file. The file's icon might look like this:
   
   
3. If you have Photoshop open, you will need to restart it. To access the new brushes, and use them, see above; "Accessing New Brushes".

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