Creating Brushes

Creating brushes for Paint Shop Pro is another simple task that rewards you with many interesting textures to use in your images.

Below is an image created by just drawing lines with a graphic tablet and the paint brush tool. To make a brush you need to select what you want to use for the brush. In this instance I just created the image below and used the magic wand to select the shape.

Once you have your shape selected you open the tools palette and click on the paint brush with the arrow in the upper right corner of the paint brush tab. (See image further down to see what this looks like.) When you click on that a dialog will come up that you can choose different tips, such as a pen, pencil, charcoal, etc. One of the options is custom. Click on custom and the following dialog box comes up. The "create" button will be available and you click on that to create your brush. It's just that simple. You now have a brush you can use.

Since you have already selected the custom brush and if you highlighted the brush you just created it should show up in the tool options as below. You can then choose a texture to use with your brush. I used the clouds texture on the images below.

The image below is my newly created brush changes colors each time I used it.

Because I created the above on a layer of its own, I can add a layer below it and fill it however I'd like and adjust layer transparency to what I prefer to make the image look the way I want to.

Creating brushes is fun and really does give you some interesting textures to use. And in creating those textures you might end up with some interesting page backgrounds. I turned the above image into a tiling background which you see used on this page.