The Presets
6) Now it’s time to make those shapes into useful brushes. Make yourself a nice big image for testing them out on as you work. Go to your brush pallet, select the thick speedline and input these values:
This will give brush that will create this in a few strokes:
Feel free to tweak these settings a little. Lowering the minimum diameter setting will give you more variance in the length and thickness of the lines. If you want to alter the length without effecting the thickness as much you can do that with the roundness jitter settings. Set the controls to ‘off’ for random, or ‘pen pressure’ if you’d like to control it manually. You can adjust the angle in the brush tip shape pane to whatever angle you like, and simply paint the speedlines onto your image. It’s worth saving this preset somewhere as it is fast, easy and quite useful for linear speedlines. However, for this tutorial we’re going to add another setting, which will allow us to use it with paths.
7) Set the angle to 180 degrees on the tip shape pane, and the angle jitter to ‘direction’. Make sure the slider is set to 0. Click the little menu on the brush pallet, select ‘New Brush Preset…’ and name it something like ‘Thick Path Speedline’.
8) Click the little lock next to ‘Shape dynamics’ so that it is closed. On the Brush Tip Shape pane, select your medium speedline. Drag the spacing back up to the maximum, and set the angle back to 180 degrees. Make a new brush preset with it and name it Medium Path Speedline.
9) Repeat the previous step with your thin speedline tip shape.
10) Save your brushes. Photoshop will save every brush you have in your pallet when you do this, so you may want to delete all of them but the ones we’ve just created so that you can save them separately.
I don’t suppose you know how to do this using Photoshop Elements 5.0? I can’t work out how to creat guidelines since it’s not under the “view” menu and if you search that into Adobe help then you just get loads of unrelated ‘guide lines’ for how to do things, rather then ‘guidelines’ if you could help that would be great thanks.
I’m not sure where in the menus they would be on 5. The only thing you need the guide for here is to make the triangle symmetrical, so you might be able to find another way to do that. (Do one side, extend the canvas, copy and flip for the other side?)
Check photoshop’s help. You also might be able to get some by dragging them off the rulers if you turn those on.
Thank you, I’ll try to find out how to do it without using the guidelines :)