Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can make dash lines and
stitches using brushes in Photoshop. And this is going to allow you to not
only
paint with stitches but also to use these to stroke things.
One of the really nice effects that you can achieve in Photoshop is the idea of
having dash lines that might show as
for example faux stitching on an object. I'm going to show you the basics of doing
that now.
The first thing I'm going to do is create a really small document. So I'm thinking
about 300 x 300 because I want to create my stitches.
It's going to be transparent.
Now stitches are a brush so the first thing I'm going to do is go and grab my brush. And I'm going
to use a rounded rectangle for this.
So I'm just going to select the rounded rectangle tool, and I'm going to draw
something that I can use as a stitch.
Now I've drawn it as a shape. So let's just undo that and let's go and draw
this as just pixels.
It's a much better
option. And I'm just going to call that my brush shape. Now you can get into more detail
with your brush shape.
What I'm going to do is just show you how you can use this to create stitches.
So now that we have this shape I'm just going to Ctrl Click on
it so I have a selected. I'm going to make it a brush by choosing Edit Define
Brush Preset.
I'm just going to call this Stitch
and click Ok.
And now I can get rid of that document.
So now we're ready to use of the stitches to draw around this shape and perhaps
across it as well.
So I'm going to select my Brush tool and I'm going to select the very last of my
brushes which is my new stitch.
And right now
it's not going to do
really very much of what I want it to do. But we're
just going to undo that and let's go and set it up to be a bit more
friendly.
We're going to open the Brushes Panel to do this. And this is my brush.
And this is the reason why it's painting the way it is is because that's the way
it's set up to paint.
So I'm going to adjust its spacing so it looks a little bit more like stitches.
And I can make them close together or far apart.
I can also change the size of them because they're pretty large right now.
But I could make them considerably smaller if I want to.
Now I can adjust Shape Dynamics as well.
And we'll just see right now how this brush is going to paint and see if we
need to make some changes to it.
Now I'm going to add another object to this design. Let's just add a shape
up here.
Let's go and fill it with a darker orange color,
Alt Backspace, Option Delete,
Ctrl D or Command D to deselect the selection. And now with
my brush I'm going to paint with white, and I'm going to paint some white
stitches
across this shape.
So I can either paint with my paintbrush or
I can click once up here to start my painting and then Shift Click across the
other side so that I get evenly placed stitches,
Click once, Shift Click on the other end.
Now as you can see the brush is not really following the shape of my painting
so I want to change the way that this brush is behaving.
But to do that I'm going into shape dynamics.
And I'm going to make sure that Size Jitter is disabled because I don't
want it to change size.
And I don't want the diameter to change either so I'm going to remove that.
I don't want the
Angle to change so I don't want it to change as I paint. But I do want it to
follow the direction of my brush. And I also do not want any Roundness
Jitter. So I'm going to make sure that everything is disabled except that the
controls are
for the Angle is now following the direction of the brush.
And now look how it's painting. Wherever my brush goes it's starting to
follow that brush. So that's a lot more
of the way I want that brush to be painting.
Okay, let's face the problem of this circle. I'm going to actually just increase the
size a little bit for this circle. Let's turn that off. So now I have my brush
selected
and I want a stroke around the circle.
So let's just go and get this layer. And I can Ctrl Click on this layer to make a
selection but I want a stroke inside the shape.
So I'm going to choose Select Transform Selection
because that allows me to transform this selection. And provided I now hold Shift
and Alt as I drag in I'm going to actually drag in on the shape so that it
now becomes a concentric circle
inside the original circle.
I'm going to click the checkmark here. So now I have a
strokeable selection. But I want to stroke it so I'm going to choose
Window and then Paths,
and I'm going to turn it into a Work Path.
And when it's a Work Path it can be stroked with a brush. And this is the option
here.
So I have my brush selected,
my color, my stitch, and it's all set up. I'm going to click here to Stroke Path
With Brush.
And we're seeing not only the path but also the brush so let's just trash the
path for now. And you can see that I now have a stitching line inside the shape.
And because I have the angle correct
the stitching line is going around the shape as if that shape were actually
stitched.
So there you have a way of creating brushes in Photoshop that you can use for
stitching.
You know how to make straight stitching lines and you know how to make stitching
lines that follow your brush. And you also know how to stitch a
shape by creating a path and then stroking that path so that you have this
really nice effect.
I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video training session.
Look out for more of my video tutorials on my YouTube channel.