Photoshop Tutorial : Photo To Lineart To Brush

I did a tutorial called photo-to-lineart and realised that I should have taken it one step further and showed you how to create a brush from the lineart. It could come in handy for doing a grunge type image or something similar.

You can start with the image below to practise on if you like, just click through for the larger version.

Open the image and duplicate the layer. Working on the duplicate layer go to Image>Adjustments>Desaturate. On this particular image I used the Find Edges filter found under Filter>Sytlize>Find Edges. Go to the top menu bar and open the levels dialogue box Image>Adjustments>Levels. You can punch in the same numbers that I have if you are using this image.

Grab a hard edged brush and make sure that the f/ground colour is set to white. You are going to paint away the excess rubbish outside of the figure. You can see what I have done in the image below.

If any of the darks lines have disappeared, grab a brush f/ground set to black – on re paint them in. The shoes that my son had in his hands have lost some of the lines, so I drew them back in again. I also did some on the lines on the shirt and face. See image below.

Next, grab the magic wand tool and set the tolerance to 10 – anti alias checked and contigious unchecked. Click in the white area of the image. Turn off the original b/ground layer (photo) and then go to Edit>Cut or press Ctrl + X on the keyboard. You should end up with something similar to the image below.

Make sure that the original photo layer is still turned off (or you can trash it) zoom out to 50% and grab the rectangular marquee tool, and make a selection around the image. See image below.

Go to the top menu bar and choose Edit>Define Brush Preset. When the dialogue box appears, choose a name for the brush. Click OK. Open a new file by going to File>New. I chose a file 500 X 700 @ 72 dpi. Create a new layer above the b/ground layer and make your brush the active tool. In the top menu bar open the brush preset picker and scroll down to the end – your newly make brush should be there, click on your brush and then close the picker. Adjust the size of your brush to suit and then click on the image

And that is the basis of making a brush from lineart. You can go ahead and change the b/ground to a colour, pattern or gradient. Do multiple brush strokes at different sizes (use a new layer for each one so you can transform the individual strokes), Rotate or warp each indivdual stroke. Try different blend modes. On the image below, I filled the b/ground with a pattern, then did one brush stroke on each new layer. I then used the Free Transform to rotate and scale the b/ground strokes. On the larger brush stroke I used the warp tool.