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Painting with the Brush and Pencil Tools (Continued)

On the Options bar, make sure the Mode is set to Normal, Opacity to 100%, and Flow to 100%.

• The Mode refers to how the colors you paint are mixed with underlying colors in the layer on which you’re painting. Normal mode paints the foreground color on top of any existing colors on the layer.
• Opacity refers to the opacity of the stroke.
• Flow refers to the opacity of each spot of color produced by the brush. The Brush tool delivers continuous spots of colors, so when one spot intersects, or is painted “on top of” another spot, the resulting stroke at that point will look darker.

The icon to the right of the Flow field enables airbrush capabilities. We won’t be using an airbrush for this, but once you’ve practiced painting, you can experiment with using the airbrush, which produces a softer stroke than the normal Brush tool. For example, once we’ve drawn the lines of our face, we’ll fill in areas with different colors. You could try using the airbrush, rather than the normal brush, to fill in those areas.

Clicking the down arrow next to Brush displays a menu of brush presets and options. The Master Diameter refers to the size of the brush, measured in pixels; ours is 13 pixels. Hardness simply refers to how soft the stroke will be—that is, how much it blends into the background. All strokes made with the Brush tool are antialiased, unlike strokes made with the Pencil tool, but a hardness of 100% comes closest to a stroke made with the Pencil tool.

The list of thumbnail strokes at the bottom are presets—you can choose one of these based on its appearance. The diameter (in pixels) is given to the left of the thumbnail.

Note:

These same options are available for the Pencil tool—that is, you can use any number of brushes with the Pencil tool.

Notice that this palette also contains an options button in the upper right corner. Click it to reveal an options menu containing a list of brush sets that can be loaded, much like you can load swatches:

You can also save the brush you define (diameter and hardness) by clicking the small page icon below the options menu button.

Tip:

The Brushes palette, which is normally docked in the palette well, offers you many more options for defining a brush:

4. With the mouse, click and drag along a portion of your image: