This week we learned to use the Brush and Airbrush tools and the Fill tool with textures. I spent hours on this! In each of the following exercises I played with the setting we were studying and left the others at the default.
The first exercise was to experiment with the hardness settings on the Brush tool. I found it rather fun to place disks of different colours on top of one another which worked almost like a gradient, especially if you reduced the hardness so that the disk had a corona. I then added one of the Picture Frames (click on Image - Picture Frame).
We studied the use of the Step setting - I had never fully understood this and it's great to have had a clear explanation. Here I set Step to 100% in order to see how it would behave with a variety of brush speeds, and directions, and I used the Left Slash brush shape.
Following the hardness options we studied Opacity - in Paint Shop Pro you can lower the opacity of the brush tool so that you can see through to the picture behind as though it is transparent. I used two settings of opacity, around 50 for the first two spots and then lowered it to around 25 for the third one. The frame is one of the ones in the Paint Shop Pro Frame collection (Images-Picture Frame).
Next we looked at the Density settings. I played with different levels of density and step in this one. I also used a variety of different Gradients to try out different effects and some of the different Brush shapes. The frame I made myself by adding a border 10 pixels wide, select with the Magic Wand, fill with Red, add the Noise effect set to 50, then go to Images-Inner Bevel and select the one you like. You can make lots of nice frames this way if the frames in the custom made selection that comes with PSP are too heavy for your picture.
Next we played with the Build Up tool to see how you could affect the look of the picture with this. I used a variety of settings (sorry I now don't know what they were) to show the image below. The background is the Red Candy gradient set to Stripe with 9 repeats. The blue gradient was added after I painted the squares using a different gradient for the brush. To add the blue gradient I clicked on the white area with the magic wand to select inside the square drawing, then filled the gradient. The border I made by going to Image-Add Border (background set to pink), then select round the gradient area and go to Image-Effects-Buttonise, select and area half way between the edge of the image and the gradient and go to Image-Effects-Buttonise again, then deselect and Image-Effects-Buttonise again. I love making borders!
For my Custom Brush picture I'm afraid I more or less copied Teacher with a few variations!! First I opened a new Image with a pale blue background for the sky, then I painted in a pale green for the grass and painted over that with a low density and brush size of around 50, I added the tree trunk and leaves as in Teacher's picture and a butterfly from a Tube which is on Celia Martin's web page - she grants permission for use of her Tubes on personal pages provided you link back. Finally I used the Clouds and a variety of Star brushes with different opacities, colours and gradients for the flowers and clouds and the circle brush shape with the yellow/white gradient for the sun.
Click Here to go to Part 2 of the lesson: Working with the Airbrush and Fill tools