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One of the staples of our t-shirt designs featured at the Assault T-Shirts website is the use of randomization and intense brush dynamics. I use plenty of other techniques in conjunction with brush dynamics, but needless to say, if it weren’t for Adobe’s incredible dynamics engine, our designs would have taken twice as long to make, and they’d be only half as tough looking. If you’d like to learn to create interesting textures, highly dynamic imagery in a short amount of time, or something similiar to what we have done with several of our t-shirts, this tutorial is for you.

Step 1 - Select a Brush Shape

The first step to getting brush dynamics going is to either use an existing brush or to create a new Photoshop brush shape based on a selection. For this tutorial we will use a simple star brush and turn it into a dynamically generated brush that changes color/size/format without doing anything other than using the tool as you normally would (by clicking and dragging) Here is what the brush stroke looks like by default when clicking and dragging

As you can see the brush is evenly spaced out and has no dynamics assigned to it whatsoever. If you’re using Adobe Photoshop CS3 then your brush dynamics are located on the brush window which you can view by going to Window>Brushes or by hitting the F5 key. Click on the label “Brush Tip Shape” to bring up the brush dynamics window. Here is what my current brush dynamics window looks like by default:

Step 2 - Shape Dynamics

Here’s where all the magic happens… In each different window there are settings for you to tweak and play with to get the desired scatter amount as well as variations in opacity, colors, (foreground and background) brightness, scaling, flow, and hue/saturation. Here’s a shot of my settings with just the shape dynamics turned on and the result that comes out of it:

Step 3 - Select a Brush Shape

If you want to scatter the stars a bit you can adjust the scatter dynamics by checking off the box and playing with the settings in that area. Here are my settings from that and their results:

Step 4 - Color Dynamics

If you want to vary the color of the brush you can do this by adjusting your foreground/background colors and then you can adjust the color dynamics. Here are my results with that:

Step 5 - Dual Brushes

My final brush dynamic that I like to use alot is the dual brush dynamic which combines the use of two brushes as if they are being used two at a time (with a layer mode specified by you) Think of it as using a marker and a paintbrush in the same hand like when you were a little kid. I’ve selected the sparkle brush and adjusted the settings on that brush to give my brush a light textured look:

My brush is begining to look alot like the Barack Obama website branding at this point, and it only took me a few minutes of experimenting with the settings to get an effect that used to take ages to complete. (You won’t find anything like this in illustrator–as of now at least)

Step 6 - Save Brush Preset

The only thing left to do now is to create a new preset for your brush and by clicking on the create new button on the brush window.

Conclusion

This is just meant to be an introduction to brush dynamics. There are limitless possibilities to what you can do with brush dynamics including using it to create randomized variations of logos like I did with the Lex & Terry T-Shirt designs as well as on the Skull Spartan Warrior Shirt. There are also other methods of dynamics that you can use such as texture, opacity, and flow. (Opacity and Flow are covered in the “Other Dynamics” Section of the Brush Window)