Photoshop & Fashion Illustration: quick tip for texture

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Photoshop tip of the day:  Never ever underestimate the power of the spackle brush.  It is probably one of the most common brushes I use in photoshop and can be applied to everything from painting, blending, erasing, blurring, creating texture, etc.

Simply put, a spackle brush is a set of little dots clustered together.  Really, that’s it.  It can range from tiny dots to very large ones, separate or layered on top of each other, but the idea is still the same.  When you use it, pigment is applied only from each individual speck within the brush.  I have included a couple examples:

Spackle brushes should be used on anything that has a distinct, visible texture, such as skin, denim (or most twill weave fabrics), and velvet.  Varying both the opacity and the flow of pigment is vital when using this brush especially if you want even blending.  Make sure you keep your opacity below 50%, somewhere between 15%-35% is usually very helpful.

I have been in a velvet phase recently, so I decided to quickly render an image using only the spackle brush so you can see what it can do.

Once again, the entire image was painted with the spackle brush, and I am currently working on a tutorial demonstrating how to use the brush for blending.

There are loads of places online to get free brushes for use in photoshop.  A great site to see the spackle brush in action is http://www.imaginefx.comwhich caters to the sci-fi/fantasy digital art crowd.  There are some phenomenally talented artists hosted on that site.