Welcome to Paintable Tips and Tricks, guys!
In this video, I'm going to show you how to blend color with the mixer brush.
And to demonstrate that, I'm going to use this painting of mine.
It's a portrait which has every values, every shadow, every highlight,
in a geometric shape and nothing is blended.
Personally, I don't start my painting like that.
But that way, it's going to be easier for me to demonstrate the tricks and the tips in this video.
The mixer brush tool is one of the greatest tools that Photoshop can offer you.
It's a brush that will act a little bit like real oil.
Like you were to paint real oil on a canvas.
First of all, you find that tool over the brush tool here, and if you look, it's the
4th one there. And when you click on it, you'll have that panel here that will
appear with all those settings that you can adjust. And depending on what you
click, it will have different effects.
Personally, I'm clicking here on this button which allows the brush each time
I'm giving a stroke, to make sure that it doesn't take the paint that I'm done painting with.
If I were to click this one here, it would use this color, and then as you can see I would paint color.
But by clicking this and clicking this,
it's not going to paint any color. What it does instead is more of acting like
a smudge tool. So it's going to move the pixels. And depending what kind of brush
that I have, it's going to move the pixels and the pigment differently.
Right now, I'm using this kind of brush, which is basically a round brush with a few
particles on it, that allows me that each time I'm giving a stroke, if i go on the
other way, it's going to give me that really nice blend.
And that's the technique that i'm using with the mixer brush.
If I also quickly go over my settings, you can see that I do it custom, so I'm going Wet 80,
Load 75, Mix 90, and Flow 100. And I always make sure that my simple layer
here is clicked on. I want to show you that over this portrait that I created.
So I'm going to create a new layer here and I'm going to start blending the colors here.
Depending on the size of my brush,
I'll be able to blend more or less, having control over what I do.
The mixer brush, with those settings, act a little bit like the smudge tool.
The difference being with the smudge tool, I only had to pass over in one way.
I didn't have to move over the pixels. With the mixer brush tool,
I have to actually move them. Like it was wet painting on my canvas and I had to
mix them together. So it gives you that feeling that you're actually painting.
A smudge tool being really like a computer setting tool.
The mixer brush tool is more like having a real brush with real paint.
If I had to put the pros and cons to this technique, I would say that the pros is that it's
blending really nicely and it gives that effect of texture that you won't have
with the smudge tool or even with the brushes with the soft round brush. You won't
have that textur-y feeling of painting. And as you see I have been picking color
but it's just a reflex because actually I'm not picking any color with this setting.
So that would be the pro. The cons of this technique is the fact also that I'm not creating any pixels again.
So I'm only blending what's on my canvas right now, but I have a little bit more
control because I'm able to push the pixels like this.
so where there's no pixel, I can actually push them and then merge them a little.
I would suggest for everybody to try this one at least once.
It's really fun to actually have that feeling that you're kind of painting for real.
Like what it would be like on a real canvas. And the effects that you
can do with it are really cool. If I were to just--if I wanted to have like a
straight edge or something more blurry, I could just go slowly on it and that
way i would keep a hard edge, and something a little bit more blurry like this.
I'll keep that hard edge and the blurriness.
So you can have a lot of control over it.
It's just that you can't create some new pixels.
And that's it for this step, I hope you enjoyed the video!
If you're interested in trying this technique and using the same brushes that I'm using,
just click on the link below the video.