Hi there.
I’m new to using brushes with Photoshop, and have been researching brush creation. How can I create a brush that has a look and feel to realistic pencils and charcoal? What I am specifically trying to achieve is strong thin lines when the pen is held upright, and soft creamy wide shading ability when the pen is on its side. Shading should be able to build up smooth and softly.
Example images from Brent Eviston, Proko, and Patrick Jones are attached. If anyone can please assist with the technicalities of setting this up, that would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
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Yes, a Wacom Cintiq Pro.
By @jonoiii
I have not used tilt sensitivity, because it tend to work the oposite way to what I'd like, and I don't know how to change it. A pencil would produce a larger and more soft stroke when angled, but in Photoshop tilting the pen produces a smaller, less opaque stroke, according to what settings you are using. Using the pen more perpendicular to the tablet produces a larger denser stroke with those same settings.
This lady has some nice ideas, but does not make use of pen tilt. I totally agree that always relying on downloaded presets does not teach you the brush engine, but you can reverse engineer downloaded presets.
Being a specialist area, I think you'll find more relevant expertise in the likes of Digital art forums and sub-reddits
I'd be interested to know what you find if you wouldn't mind post back here. Thanks
Hi Trevor. Thank you for your reply.
I have done some further reading on this matter. It appears that Photoshop doesn't have the ability to control the size of the brush, based on tilt. At least that is what other forum posts have stated, dating years back for people requesting this feature. I did come across one interesting feature that is half working for me, Erodible Tips. This was introduced in CS6 (if I recall correctly), and basically provides function like a pencil. Right now, everything is working for me except for adding texture and proper flow. Attached is a preview.
Hah, funnily enough, as I am writing this I just managed to get dual brush and textures to work. I will post an update soon.
Hi @davescm! Thank you very much for your reply.
Perhaps you can assist with this, please and thank you. That setting is something I initially tried and could not get to work properly. I've attempted it again after you have advised using this, and have attached screenshots for you to see. It appears that my brush is not really getting much larger when I tilt my pen, as illustrated below.
I've attached a screenshot within Krita with a default charcoal brush that works out of the box. I didn't change pen pressure, only the tilt of my brush.
If you have any advice on how we can achieve similar functionality within Photoshop, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
@jonoiii I have limited experience with Krita, and don't have the Charcoal_KA pencils. I'm using 5.2.9
These are what it finds when I look for Pencil
I'm thinking if I/we have the same preset, then we can look at its settings and have a better idea how to get there with Photoshop.
I'd been playing with this for an hour or so before I asked about the charcoal_KA pencil brush, so well over two hours in total. That includes watching the video you linked to of Ramon Miranda' amazing sketch of actress Jean Simmons using Krita.
So far I have not been able to create a Photoshop preset that comes close to Krita's CVharcoal_KA. Presets that I thought might cut it suddenly leave me embarrassed to compare, and that includes several pencil sketch preset ideas I found on YouTube.
About the closest I have come is starting with this preset from the Dry Media group from the Default brushes.
As it comes it has no control of opacity, and looks like this regardless.
Changing size jitter to tilt has minimal effect with wither of my Wacom pens, but setting Flow Jitter to pen pressure got me to here. It still doesn't feel as nice to use as the Krita Charcoal_KA preset though, and my gut tells me might never match it.
This is the Krita stroke. It's opacity remains constant whereas all of the Photoshop pencil brush ideas I found have a regular dark/light/dark/light pattern. The Krita stroke is definitely smoother.
I don't know if we have been any help at all, but it has been an interesting learning experience for me. I was using an Intous 5 Touch for the above, but I have an XenceLabs Pen Display that I'll plug in later to see if it works any better.
Please let us know how you get on with this, and share any presets or settings that work for you.
Good luck.
The effect of tilt can be lessened if you are using the dual brush function. Turning that off, setting the minimum diamater to 100% and tilt scale to 200% showed this difference in strokes between upright and tilted :
Photoshop is limited to 200% difference between upright and tilted (as set in tilt scale) but you can of course combine that with pressure by reducing minimim diamater to 0%. Left to right - upright light pressure, upright hard pressure, tilted light pressure, tilted hard pressure:
If you need to use a dual brush, you may see less effect and you may also need adjust the size in the dual brush to work with the tilt.
It would of course be nice if we could go higher than 200% on tilt scale but we cannot at present.
Dave
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