Okay, so I thought it was about time I released these. I’ve been using these little babies to make a lot of my swirl designs, including those in the most recent “St. Patrick’s Day” brush set. They are basically a bunch of parts or sections of what would make up a swirly design… so that you can put them all together to make your OWN swirl designs.

Never thought you would be able to make your own swirls? Well, now you should be able to! The most important thing about being able to use these proficiently is to know how to rotate your brush. So that you can add the swirl part exactly where you want it, at exactly the right angle that you want it. I can’t make each swirl part available in 180 degrees worth of angles, that’s just not realistic for me to do… or for you to have to download! So, please be sure to check out the “Brushes Tip” below, if you’re not sure how to rotate your brush before or as you’re using it!

Go Now to the Downloads Page!

Brushes Tip:

To make the most of these brushes, you need to be able to rotate them and flip them to be used at the EXACT angle/orientation that you want to. You can change the angle of your brush before you even use it! Here’s how:

Have your brush tool selected, with the brush you’re wanting to use loaded. Click on the “Brushes” tab in the upper right area of your Photoshop window (F5 will also open it). Click on “Brush Tip Shape.”

Now, you’ll see an area where there’s a circle with a crosshair through it, with an arrow on one side of the crosshair. Say that you want to rotate your brush about 40 degrees to the right. You can either type in “-40″ into the “Angle” area, or you can click on the arrow part of that crosshair, then drag your mouse to rotate it around to where you want it to be. You can check how your brush looks in the preview area beneath!

In more recent versions of PS, there’s also the options for Flip X and Y, which… well, basically flip the brush horizontally or vertically. That’s handy for adding borders to something, like if you have a corner brush that’s made for the upper right corner and you want to also use it in the upper left… just Flip X, and voila!

This latest set of Photoshop brushes is made up of various “urban” vector designs. Some of the items are very recognizable as urban, or something that you’d find in a city. Others are designs, like various circles and such, that tend to go along with urban-based designs. If you check out my preview image, you’ll see what I mean! I’m sure you’ve seen these designs before.

All of these are very high resolution, with the average brush size being about 1600 pixels (some smaller ones are 1200 or so, the larger ones are 2100 or so).

Includes: barbed wire, buildings, chain link fence, various circles, street lamps, miscellaneous vector designs, razor wire, smoke, a smokestack, vector splatters, telephone poles, and more!

Go Now to the Downloads Page!

Just a quick plug… some of you may have visited the Obsidian Dawn homepage and seen that I changed it into a portal for my various websites (and parts of Obsidian Dawn).  There is a link to here, my older artwork that was originally on Obsidian Dawn’s homepage, my graphic design info, my scrapbooking stuff (which is also now free, btw), AND a new website where I’ll be displaying all of my new artwork.   Most of it will be fantasy and nature related, and it’s going to be my professional portfolio.  I’m starting to get to a point where I think I’m decent enough to work as an artist professionally, so once I get a few more pieces in there I’m going to try to get some work at various companies (perhaps some fantasy trading card games, etc).  There’s just two paintings up there so far, but please feel free to check it out at Rainne.com!

Random Brushes Tip:

In the upper right hand corner of your Photoshop window is the “Brushes” tab (if you can’t find it, hit F5 to open it). You can drag that tab outside of that small docking area if you’re going to be doing a lot of work with your brush settings. Just click and drag it outside of the docking area, and where you drop it, a Brushes window will be created.

You can, in fact, drag all of your different tabs around like that. If you want your layers and channels tabs in separate windows, you can drag and drop one of them outside of the other to separate them.

Don’t worry, you can put them back where they were, too. If you drag and drop a tab next to another one, you will merge them into the same window… including that small docking area up at the top where the “Brushes” tab started out.

This can make it much easier if you’re planning on working in a particular tab a good deal. It’s also a great way to get rid of some stuff when you’re not using it much!

(If you want to change the order of the tabs, drag them outside of the window temporarily and then drag them back into the window in the REVERSE order from how you’d like them to appear from left to right. In other words, the most recent tab that you dragged into any particular area will always appear on the right side.)

This newest set is just the result of some playing around. Some of the more popular brushes in my glitter brush set were the glittery swirls, so I took that and ran with it. Some of these are glittery, some aren’t… but all should look like they’re glowing. Kind of like various light special effects! (Hence the name, right?)

Go Now to the Downloads Page!

Next week, a tutorial on making seamless patterns! I’ve had several requests for this, and keep forgetting to do it. But no longer!

Brushes Tip: To get these to look like my preview image…

• start with a dark background
• make a new layer (SHIFT + CTRL + N for PC) (SHIFT + CMD + N for Mac)
• select the brush in this set that you’d like to use
• making sure white is your foreground color, click somewhere on the canvas to use the brush
• click on the “Add a Layer Style” button at the bottom left of your layers palette (or choose Layer > Layer Style from the main menu) and then choose Outer Glow
• set the blend mode to “Normal” and choose a strong, saturated color (bright red would work well, light pink would not)
• play with the “Size” slider until it looks how you want it, and then hit OK
• that’s it!

More wings! I’ve been meaning to make another wings set for a while now, but this time I focused specifically on fairy (fae, pixie, whatever you want to call them!) wings. They’re also a bit different from your typical, plain ol’ fairy wings. These have some pretty glowing tendril thingies (really not sure what else to call them!) that come along with them (and also some wings without them). They make pretty wings on their own, too!

Go Now to the Downloads Page!

Random Brushes Tip:

Oftentimes, you won’t want a brushes shape to be exactly how the brush was made to be. For example, these wings brushes were made to be used from “straight on” - but most times, that won’t be how you want to use them! So, in order to help them fit your model, you should follow these tips.

1. Open up the file with the image where you want to use the brushes.
2. On the left side, click on the brush tool. Up on top, just under the main menu, it will show you the shape of the brush that you have selected. Click on the arrow to the right of that.
3. Slide the “Master Diameter” slider to the right or left so that the brush is the size that you want it to be
4. Hit F7 to make sure that your layers palette is showing. If something disappears, hit F7 again. If it appears, great.
5. Down at the bottom of that, you’ll see some little buttons. The one just to the left of the trash can is the “Create a New Layer” button. Click that.
6. NOW click on the canvas with the brush you selected (making sure the color is what you want!).
7. Over in that Layers Palette on the right, the new “Layer 1″ layer should still be highlighted. By putting this brush on its own layer, you can now manipulate the brush and not the rest of the painting/image.
8. Edit > Transform > Distort
9. In that little box that shows up, click on the various corners of the image to distort the brush shape so that it’s how you want it.

You can use this method to change the angles of things, the basic shape, as well as the perspective!

Say that you wanted to use one of my Arcane Circles brushes, and have it look like its lying on the floor. You would follow the same steps above, and when it comes time to drag the corners to distort the image, you would move the top two corners toward each other and down a bit. The bottom two corners, you would widen. This should make the circle look like it’s sitting on a floor! Fine tune it by moving the corners as you see fit, to make it fit your specific floor angle.

This newest set is for you painters out there! These are textured brushes.. not just a texture that you stamp on, mind you. This is something that you paint, and it creates a really great texture as you do. These are WONDERFUL for painting textured backgrounds (like something you’d see behind a portrait that you’d get taken at a photography studio). Or whatever! Come up with your own ideas for how to use them… the uses are really limitless. Maybe you want a line with a bit more texture, and are sick of Photoshop’s base texture brushes. These are for you!

So, yeah, this set is a bit different … but you may have noticed that I’ve started making a few of those! (The “Special Effects” brush set is also similar in that you paint with them rather than “stamp” them.)

Go Now to the Downloads Page!

Brush Tip:

While these brushes are already made with some built in special styles to them, you may want to edit them and play around with the various texture effects that you can create!

To do that, you’re going to want to check out your brushes palette window. It is located in the upper right section of your Photoshop window. You can open it by clicking on the “Brushes” tab or by hitting F5 (Mac: F5).

Some of the settings that you’ll want to play with (the section they’re under will be in bold):

• Brush Tip Shape: Spacing - this changes how often the “imprint” of the brush shape is made, spreading it out or compacting them more tightly together
• Shape Dynamics: Size Jitter - this changes the size of the brush each time that an imprint of the brush shape is made
• Shape Dynamics: Angle Jitter - this changes the angle of the brush each time that an imprint of the brush shape is made
• Shape Dynamics: Roundness Jitter -this changes, well, the roundness of the brush shape each time that an imprint is made - from flattened to a full circular shape
• Scattering: Scatter - as the name implies, this scatters the brush imprints around more or less
• Other Dynamics: Opacity - this changes the opacity of the brush each time that an imprint of the brush is made

This is only a start. If you want to learn more about these settings, check out my Tutorial on Advanced Brush Techniques in Photoshop.