Vandelay Design

35 Tutorials for Mastering Photoshop Brushes

Published September 17th, 2008 in Design

Thank you for visiting the Vandelay Design Blog! We regularly publish collections of Photoshop tutorials like this one. If you would like to improve your Photoshop skills, please consider subscribing to our feed by RSS or by email so you don’t miss these posts.

For Photoshop users, downloading free brushes and creating your own custom brushes can quickly help you to achieve more effective results and improve productivity and efficiency at the same time. There are essentially unlimited options when working with brushes, so it’s a skill that can always be further developed.

Regardless of your skill level in working with brushes you should find some tutorials here for you. Some cover the basic uses and functionality of brushes, some will teach you various ways to create your own custom brushes, and some will help you to develop your skills by using them as an integral part of a design.

You may also be interested in the following collections of Photoshop tutorials:

Rotating Brushes

A simple way to rotate any brush to fit your needs.

Managing Your Brushes and Brush Libraries in Photoshop

Once you’ve downloaded and created a number of brushes, managing and organizing them will become more important.

Photoshop Brush Tutorial: Shape Dynamics – Size Controls

This tutorial looks at the basics of working with brushes and how size control can impact your results.

Define Brush Photoshop Tutorial

A simple tutorial for getting started with creating and working with brushes.

Custom Brushes Tutorial

A quick tutorial to help you create your first brushes in minutes.

Funky Web Design Layout

Create a layout using several different brushes for the header.

How to Install Photoshop Brushes

Knowing how to install brushes is a basic, but necessary, skill.

Creating Your Own Custom Adobe Photoshop Brushes

A nice tutorial for creating useful brushes from public domain images.

Fire Brushes: Photoshop Tutorial

Using brushes can be a quick way to create excellent fire effects.

Adobe Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to get the most out of simple brushes.

Create Photoshop Brushes for Coffee Stains and Splatters

Use real coffee stains and a scanner to create effective brushes.

Master the Brush in Photoshop

Learn more about various aspects of working with brushes.

Create Custom Photoshop Brush from a Photo

Learn how to create awesome brushes straight from a photograph.

Creating Your Own “Dirt” Brush

An easy way to create a grungy, dirt brush.

Building a Lego Bricks Photoshop Brushes Set

A fun way to work with brushes and Lego shapes.

Creating Your Own Grunge Brushes

Get a trendy grunge look by making your own brushes.

Design a Grungy Web Layout

A real-world example of brushes in action while creating a layout.

Creating Grunge Brushes

Veerle shows us some simple techniques to create impressive results.

Photoshop Brush Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to create a brush from a texture image.

Photoshop Brush Tutorial

See several different possible effects that can be created with brushes.

Advanced Brush Techniques in Photoshop

Go beyond the basics with some of these techniques.

Photoshop Brush Tutorial on deviantART

Learn how to quickly create stunning light effects.

How to Make a Photoshop Brush

Bittbox’s tutorial for creating brushes.

Create Eye-Popping Graphics with Photoshop Brushes

This tutorial from SitePoint shows a few different styles that can be created by using brushes.

Stroke Text with a Brush

A simple way to add some life to text, with plenty of possibilities.

How to Make an Awesome Grungy Paper from Scratch

This Bittbox tutorial uses brushes for creating the grungy paper.

Grunge Type Photoshop Tutorial

Creating Grunge-style text is easy with the help of brushes.

Lighting Effects in Photoshop

This tutorial from Digital Arts makes heavy use of brushes.

Add a Sparkle Trail to a Photo

Use a sparkly brush to enhance a photo.

Really Cool Eclipse Effect in Photoshop

Fabio shows that brushes can even be used for creating an eclipse.

Create Cool Watercolor Effects in Photoshop

Several different brushes are used here to create the watercolor effect.

Amazing Photoshop Light Effect in 10 Steps

Brushes can be used to create sparkling light effects.

Create a Space Explosion from Scratch

Brushes are used here to create the debris in the explosion.

Easily Create a Beautiful, Unique Website Header

Brushes are used for creating the lighting effects on this header.

Abstract Dust and Spray Effect

Using brushes to create this abstract effect.

For more even more Photoshop resources, please see:

77 Responses to “35 Tutorials for Mastering Photoshop Brushes”

Brian September 17th, 2008

Whoa, I just started writing an identical post yesterday. Guess you beat me to the punch eh? Not a problem, this is a great collection – well done!

Vandelay Design September 17th, 2008

Sorry Brian. I’ve had that happen to me before and it kind of sucks.

adelle September 17th, 2008

some great resources here!

Mike Smith September 18th, 2008

Awesome post with some great resources. Definitely a bookmarker/stumbler :)

Tracey Grady September 18th, 2008

I like creating my own brushes and customising existing ones, so this list will come in handy for giving me new ideas. Thanks, Steven.

Dainis Graveris September 18th, 2008

Damn, just in the morning tought about this kind of review about how to use brushes! Maybe that’s good because I really got interest to use my brushes better. Anyway – I like the post, because I will really learn from it! :)

Assault September 18th, 2008

Thanks for posting my two tutorials!! Much more to come from us!

Vandelay Design September 18th, 2008

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I’m glad it’s a useful resource that can help improve your design process.

NaldzGraphics September 18th, 2008

nice list.its very useful.thanks for this steven:)

Ronald

Asis September 18th, 2008

wow, muy buenos tutoriales,
saludos a todos

Thomas | Brush King September 19th, 2008

Thanks, for the list :)

Angie Bowen September 20th, 2008

Really nice and helpful list. Thanks so much!

Corey-Departika & Mediaslap.com September 24th, 2008

Thanks for including our posts on your list.

Kay Brenner October 8th, 2008

I just need to find the perfect workstation that give me all the CPU power with all the filters in place in Photoshop

Svetainių kūrimas October 8th, 2008

Thanks for including our posts on your list.

br
svetainiu kurimas

skins for bebo October 19th, 2008

wow excellent thanks for thi s impressive list.

Web Buckets November 5th, 2008

Nice collect, but for me… brushes is not that great if you don’t have the keen eye of a designer… coz you still need to combine it with colors.. and designers have that eye… but anyway this is cool collectu buddy..

cha April 23rd, 2009

Very Cool! Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for your tutorial, that’s really help me to learn it.

Shivanand Sharma June 14th, 2009

The use of Georgia/serif fonts here doesn’t look as good as the sans-serifs you used earlier. You could use sans-serif at least for the sidebars.

Additionally the attribution to Cutline in the footer is barely visible on the off-white background.

Vandelay Design June 14th, 2009

Hi Shivanand,
I have been meaning to fix the text color in the footer and just hadn’t gotten around to it. It’s fixed now. As far as the font is concerned, it’s not Georgia, it is Times New Roman. I got sick of looking at Arial so I decided to try something different. Will probably go back to Arial at some point. I don’t think it makes sense to use a serif on body copy and a sans serif in the sidebar. They should be consistent in my opinion. Using a one for headings and the other for body copy makes more sense to me.

Shivanand Sharma June 14th, 2009

Of course. I just find that serifs look more acceptable on white backgrounds which gives a newspaper like feel. For a site as polished as yours… as you said it, a sans-serif font will look better. Thanks for fixing the footer attribution.

Simon August 2nd, 2009

There are some great tutorials here Steven, just what I was looking for, brushes make it much easier to produce pro content in Photoshop.

studio mastering August 21st, 2009

great thanks im trying to do my new website in flash this is a great help ill let you know when i have mastered it

seo marketing October 2nd, 2009

this is a great help i just managed to tweek my own creative in photoshop yesterday very addictive thanks

Zulfiqar January 26th, 2010

very nice and ig collection of photoshop lovers. Thanx for the effort.

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