How to create splatter paint effects in Adobe Photoshop CC
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Hi there, this video we're going to explore brushes. We're going to look at this Drip Brush, plus this kind of like scratching one in the background. We're going to take this image and add all these kind of effects to it. Let's get in there and learn how to do this now in Photoshop.
First things first, let's go to 'File', 'Open'. And in your "Exercise Files', under '14 Brushes', we're going to use 'Brush 02'. Thank you, Hunter Johnson. Let's click 'OK'. Next thing to do is, I want to draw that kind of splat that comes out of the shoes, so I'm going to make sure it's on its own layer, and this is going to be my 'Red Splat 1'. I need to pick the brush that I want to use, so under my 'Brushes', I'm going to go up the top here, and we're going to start looking at these special effects brushes. You might have to twirl that up and find the special effects. I'm going to use, I've experimented with them all, they're all real cool.
I'm going to use this first one here, 'Spatter Bot Tilt'. In terms of the size, hovering out here. You can kind of see a preview of it. Make sure caps lock is on, caps lock will be target. Turn your caps lock off on your keyboard and it goes back to the splat. Brush size, I'm going to get it down quite small. '70'. In terms of the color, what I'd like to do is match the same color as the shoe. So depending on-- you might be a black and white like this, what you can do is, you can grab the 'Eyedropper Tool' and say-- see this little bottom left of it? It's a little tippy top of it, well tippy bottom left. Click on that and you can see, it's changed my foreground color to match this shoe. Back to my Brush Tool.
Now what I'm going to do is click, hold, and kind of drag it off, to make it look like it's spraying out, looks quite gore. It's kind of cool, I like it. So I'm clicking and dragging, you can click a few times, in a little bit of a circle to kind of try and get it there. Change the brush size, gone smaller. I can go bigger. It's like really big, I like to just have one or two. That's probably enough. And you get what I'm trying to do. So we've got our kind of ink coming out of there. Let's go a little bit further. And what we're going to do is do some type exploding, like you saw.
So I am going to click 'OK'. Going back to my 'Move Tool', it's freaking out. I'm going to go to my 'Type Tool'. I'm going to click once, and I'm going to type in 'Remix'. That font is teeny tiny, I'm going to grab it, drag it up. Clicking, holding that icon, and dragging. That's the easiest way, well one of the easy ways. Now I'm going to use Remachine. Remember we used this earlier on, we installed it in a previous video. You can download it free online for personal use. If you want to use it commercially, Remachine, you got to go and pay for it. So I'm going to drag it, make it bigger. I'm going to make the font over here white. Nothing special. What I'm not going to do is I'm not going to actually explode it on this layer. I'm just going to have another layer just above it.
So a new layer, this one here is going to be 'White Slap'. We'll go a little bit further with this one. So we'll do exactly what we did before, I'm going to grab my 'Brush Tool.'. I'm going to make sure-- I could use my Eyedropper Tool to pick the white. We could just click on this thing, toggle between these two, it depends. Whatever you do, we want white as the foreground, grab the 'Brush Tool'. And in terms of the size I'm going to practice, it's probably a little big. So we're on our own layer, so we can turn it off later on. I'm going to try and kind of get this to look like it's spraying out. That's my goal anyway.
Loop at the end there, try and get it all. I'm going to play with the Brush Size now, make it a little bit bigger. Undo. Man, it's hard to do random. Luckily this brush is amazing, right? Thank you, Carl Webster; you are awesome. We're going to do a couple of big ones, and I'll show you a couple little tricks that I like to do. So maybe too big. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make another layer. And this is going to be 'White out of focus'. Kind of faking depth of the field. So I'm going to make a nice big brush, and have one, maybe two of them. Just a couple of them around. What I'd like to do is just blur this layer.
So with that layer selected go to 'Filter', 'Blur', 'Gaussian Blur'. And just, maybe lower it down a little bit. Can you see what I mean? They're just a little bit out of focus. Preview on. They're kind of stuck against the glass, whereas that looks like they're kind of coming right at you. You might like them. I'm going to do the same for the red stuff. So I'm going to make a red splat, that is 'Red out of focus'. If you're asking whether I name my layers this well all the time, I do not. I normally have layer 1-10, it's bad practice. So my brush, nice big brush. I'm going to have a-- because it's random, no two brushes are the same, which is really cool. So I'm going to go to that. Maybe one more, there we go. And I want it above the text, but I also want to go to 'Filter', 'Blur', 'Gaussian Blur'. Find a blur that works for me, click 'OK'. And now we're getting that stuff where it feels like it's in front of the text, it's exploding out, I can still move it, because it's on its own layer.
So that's the Splatter Brush, I love the Splatter Brush. We're going to look at one more brush before we go. We can go through every single brush, I guess, it's going to be some experimentation you need to do. I'm going to show you one more brush because it's a little bit fancy, and it works a little bit differently than just regular paint brushes like these. So for this to work we are going to create a new layer. We're going to call this one 'Scratch'. And we're going to find, we're going to go to the 'Brush Tool', we're going to drop this down. I'm going to go into this one here called Concept Brushes. Scratch Blend.
So the difference is, can you see, that's a brush, that's a brush. See these ones here, they have the little finger. That's actually using something called the Smudge Tool. They're in the brushes, because they make sense in here, but they're actually a completely separate tool. So if I click back out here, you can see we're not on my paintbrush anymore. We're on this Smudge Brush. Same as Smudge Brush, it's called this Smudge Tool. And I show you that because there's a few brushes like the Mixer Brush, and there's a bunch of other ones, it doesn't really matter. Find them in their drop down, it will switch to them. You might have to play around with the effect, but what we want to do is, I'm going to turn all these layers off. I'm clicking, holding, and dragging across the eyes. Not sure if you know you can do that, you can do one individually, or just click, hold, and drag them. Because what I want to do is-- I'm going to maybe have it just, my Scratch Layer, just left background, but for this to work you got to turn all the other layers off. And Brush Size, mine's at 175. I'm going to click once to show you kind of what it does. I's a little hard to see, I guess. It's a little hard to see because it's not working at all. I pretend I knew I was doing there.
It's this one here, needs to be on, 'Sample all Layers'. So it's going to go through my empty layer and see the stuff in the background. Now watch, if I click, it's kind of this way, that kind of, just kind of moves things around, smudges them. It's a really quite cool effect. Don't be tempted to click, hold, and drag because it-- it works, you can see that, it's kind of smudged it but it's-- can freak your machine out. So I like to do it in smaller bits, and turn the strength down a little bit. I'm clicking in little pieces. There we go, clicking once, clicking twice. Clicking little drags. It's a little bit hard for the computer to catch up. It will depend on the quality of your image, but you can quite see, it's quite cool, right? It looks like it's been on a sheet of glass, or something has been upside down jiggling in the car. Or the front of your cell phone if you don't look after it.
It's just cool effects that I want to use. I'm going to turn all these guys back on afterwards. It's this kind of grungy remix thing that I thought might look cool. It's okay. But there are lots of brushes to play around with. What I'll do in the next video is I'll show you how to find brushes online. And how to install them, and we'll do some cool stuff with drips. I will see you in the next video.