Saving your own brushes in Photoshop

For the purposes of this post, I made 3 simple brushes – a bone, a bowtie and a happy face. I have a background layer in white, but you don’t have to worry about turning it off, Photoshop sees white as transparent.

First, select around the brush, then go to EDIT>DEFINE BRUSH PRESET and name it whatever you want.

When you’ve done that, select the brush tool, then click up at the top to open the brush options panel, scroll all the way to the bottom, and you’ll see your new brushes. If it’s hard to see what they actually are, click the gear button on the top right and make sure BRUSH TIP SHAPE is checked.

Ok now to try them. Let’s start with the bone. Open the brushes window WINDOW>BRUSHES and adjust the spacing and give it a try.

So first of all it’s way too big, and it’s just stamping it the exact same way. Which is fine if that’s what you want. But let’s try something else. Click on BRUSH SETTINGS>SHAPE DYNAMICS and under the angle jitter option click the control dropdown menu and choose DIRECTION.

Now I made the brush a lot smaller and look, I can actually almost write with it! Maybe a bone alpha coming up for next Halloween!

Now if you click the brushes tab again you can pick any other brush and it will do the same thing, you just have to adjust the size and spacing whenever you choose a new brush.