Paint Brushes: A Beginner’s Photoshop Elements Tutorial

Learn about Basic Paint Brushes in Photoshop Elements.
This beginner tutorial shows how to paint a flower urn using only two basic tools.

Are you ready to learn about paint brushes in Photoshop Elements?

Let’s get right into this beginner’s tutorial!

Open Photoshop Elements on your computer, pick “EXPERT” and click on the “Open” menu drop down arrow from the top of the left tool bar.  Choose “New Blank File.”  On the pop up, fill in the boxes with 1000 pixels x 1000 pixels.  Enter “300” in the Resolution box, RGB color mode, and “White” background. You don’t need to give it a name just yet.  Tap “ok.”

A white square will show up on your design space.

1. Picking Paint Brushes on Photoshop Elements

Hover over the icons on left side toolbar.  Under “DRAW,” the first icon on the left is the paint brush tool we’ll use today. 

Choosing the paintbrush tool opens a dialog box. Today we’ll look at “Brush,” “Size,” and “Opacity.”

Tap on the “Brush” menu arrow.  It will say “Default Brushes.”  Assuming you haven’t used any brushes before, the brush on the top of the list will be a tiny black dot that will say “hard round pixel” when you hover over it with your mouse.  As you scroll down, the black dots will get bigger, indicating a larger size dot of paint.

When you get to “hard round 60 pixels” the next one might be “soft round 5 pixels.”

In this tutorial, these are the two brushes we’ll play with.  It’s best to keep it simple to start with, right?  You don’t even want to know what some of the other brushes do at this point, although as you get better at this program, you’ll wonder, “Why didn’t she tell us about this brush to begin with?” because it will do faster and better what we’ll do with our basic two brushes today.

That’s okay.

No one does multiplication before they learn addition.  At least, not on purpose.

Okay, so now click on “hard round 19 pixels” brush.  The dialog box will say Size: 19 pixels.  Opacity is 100.

2. Picking a Photoshop Paint Brush Color

Under “COLOR” on the lower left toolbar, you will see two boxes.  The lower box, “background color,” will remain white.

Click on the top box, which is “foreground color.”  It’s the color our paint brush will put on the canvas.

Whoosh.  The Color Picker (foreground color) pops up.  You’ll see that the icon switched automatically from “paintbrush” to “eyedropper.”  This eyedropper helps you zero in on colors in a picture, and choose a match.

To the right of the big color box on the Color Picker you will see a slider bar.  Place your mouse on the little white arrows and slide them up and down to see what happens to the color box.  You’ll notice that as the colors change, all the numbers change also.  Every nuance of color has its own RGB numbers, and also the number and letter combination in the white “Hexadecimal” box below the RGB boxes.

Play with the Color Picker

Just for fun, type 00000 in the white hexadecimal box.  Your “new” color is black, and the eyedropper circle is in the lower left (or right) corner of the color picker box.  The little white arrows are at the bottom of the slider.

Type in fff or ffffff.  RGB will all be 255, and the eyedropper is top left.  This is always white, with red colors in the box, the same reds as 00000.  255 is always the brightest a color can go.

Type in ccc or cccccc, and you will be back to the gray color we started out with.  The RGB are all 204.

Let’s type in four c’s: cccc, a teal color.  R is 0, G and B are still 204.  Notice the little white arrows zipped up to nearly the center of the slider.  The eyedropper is all the way to the right, about 1/4 of the way down.

Below the color picker box, there’s white box to tick if you want web safe colors.  You can ignore this, as it seems to be a left over from dinosaur days.  Some used 8 bit color versus the common 24 bit now.  No one is using that old of an operating system by now.  And I don’t really even know what that means; I’m just repeating what I’ve read!

2. Paint Brush is now loaded: let’s paint.

Click “ok” in the top right corner of the Color Picker.  On the left toolbar towards the bottom, the top “foreground” color box switches to the color we just chose.

We have cccc for our “hexadecimal” color, the beautiful teal.

We have a “hard round 60 pixels” brush loaded with this color.

Place your mouse cursor above the white design box, left press the mouse and the paint brush creates a circle.

Beside the paintbrush tool on the left toolbar, you will see an “eraser” tool.  Click on the eraser tool.

On the bottom toolbar, the dialog box shows us three eraser choices.  The plain eraser, the eraser with a scissors, and the eraser with a star.  Click on the plain eraser.  You will see “brush,” “size” and “opacity.” “Brush” actually means the eraser tool for now, since that is what we have chosen.  If you run up and down the menu of the “brush” it will look the same as for the paint brush tool.  This can be a lot of fun, but for now, we’ll erase our circle we just drew.  Slide the opacity bar to 100% and hover your cursor on the circle you drew.  Click and erase.

Yep.  That simple!

Let’s paint something.

3. Paint a Basic Urn With Photoshop Paint Brushes

Click on “brush tool” and then go to the size bar in the lower dialog box.  In the box to the right of the size slider, enter 600 pixels.

Eyes lower right, pick “Brush Settings” and look at the lowest slider on the box that pops up.  “Roundness.”

Slide the size to 25%, or enter 25 in the roundness box.  Now instead of a circle, your brush will paint an oval. On the right side of the screen is another toolbar, with the layers of your design. Right now you have the background layer. Find the “create new layer” box at the top left. Double click on the name of the new layer and call it “oval.” Find your oval brush on the left and hover over the white design box. Drop the oval in the top center of the white space.

Go to the right toolbar and right click “oval” layer. Tap “duplicate layer” and “oval layer copy” will appear. Go to left side toolbar, and make sure the top left “Select” tool is chosen. This will choose the oval layer copy. Use your down arrow key to move this oval down near the bottom of the white square. Using only the down key keeps it in direct line with the top oval.

Right mouse the oval layer and create another oval. With the top left select tool, click on the bottom center of the new oval, and drag it down to the bottom of the oval at the bottom of the page. This makes a large oval that creates the body of the urn. Name this layer “urn body.”

At top right of right toolbar, create a new layer. Name this layer “right urn handle.”

Left toolbar, under “Draw” choose the top left “Brush” tool. Down to the lower toolbar, enter “300” for the size of the brush. Choose “Brush settings” and enter “75” for roundness, and “95” for direction.

Hover over the right side of the urn body and click where you want the handle.

Right click the “right urn handle” layer and duplicate this layer. Name it “left urn handle.” Go to the top toolbar and get the “Image” dropdown. Hover over “Rotate” and scroll down the dropdown to “flip layer horizontal.” Be sure you’re near the lower end of the dropdown and it says “layer” in the “flip” dialog. This will flip the urn handle only. On the left toolbar, under “Select” choose the “move” tool. With the left arrow on your keyboard, move the urn handle straight across the urn body to the left side. With the “move” tool on, and the handle selected, use the center point of the selection to place the handles at the same place on each side of the urn body.

Now make a copy of the right urn handle. Make sure the copy layer is selected, and name it “right handle opening.” On left toolbar, select the top color picker, and change the color to white. Then, about in the center of the left toolbar, choose the “paint bucket” tool, right under the “brush” tool. Hover over the new urn handle layer, and click. This changes the handle from teal to white. Since the two layers are the same size, you won’t be able to see the teal handle. Select the “move” tool, click on a corner of the dotted square, and move the white layer to about half the size of the teal handle layer. Position it where it looks best. Right click on the white layer, scroll down and choose “merge down.” This fuses the white and teal handle layers together.

Repeat the above steps with the left handle.

Wow.  Can you believe you just drew an urn?

You can bask in the art you just made, or continue on and add shadows and highlights for a 3D look.

Create New Layers for Highlights and Shadows

Highlights: Layer 2 Set

Arrange all the original layers in this order, from the top down. (Click and hold on a layer in the right side tool bar and drag it up or down as needed.)

• Top oval
• Urn body
• Bottom oval
• Left urn handle
• Right urn handle

Be sure the white layers of the urn handles always remain on the very top of all handle layers.

Now select each original layer one at a time and duplicate them again. You will have 5 copy layers. From the color selector on the left toolbar, pick a teal halfway between the original color and black. With the “paint bucket” pour this color on all the copy layers. Remember to select the layer you want to change color from the layer toolbar on the right side of the screen.

• Top oval copy
• Top oval
• Urn body copy
• Urn body
• Left urn handle copy
• Left urn handle
• Right urn handle copy
• Right urn handle
• Bottom oval copy
• Bottom oval

Select the eraser tool from the left tool bar. From the bottom toolbar, change the eraser to soft eraser. Then enter 100 as the size.

Select each copy layer in turn and erase the dark teal back to where you would normally see shadow on a pitcher. The soft edge of the eraser will create a nice fade between the original color and the shadow color. I increased the size of the eraser for the body of the urn so there would be a more gradual fade.

Remember, if you make mistakes, there’s an undo button on the bottom of the work screen. I use this a lot!

Photoshop Elements Tutorial: Shadows, Layer 3

Duplicate each layer from the above list. With the color selector on the left toolbar, pick a teal at the top right from the original color. Select each new layer from the right layer bar and drop the highlight color on with the “paint bucket” tool. Now your list of layers will look like this:

• Top oval copy 2
• Top oval copy
• Top oval
• Urn body copy 2
• Urn body copy
• Urn body
• Left urn handle copy 2
• Left urn handle copy
• Left urn handle
• Right urn handle copy 2
• Right urn handle copy
• Right urn handle
• Bottom oval copy 2
• Bottom oval copy
• Bottom oval

Urn Top Opening Shadow: Layer 4 in Photoshop Elements Tutorial

There’s one more layer to add. Duplicate the original top oval and color it black with the “paint bucket” tool.

Then with the soft eraser at size 100, barely touch the outsides of the black oval to erase it just enough to look like the inside shadow of the urn.

5. Do you like the result of the Photoshop Paint Brushes Tutorial?

Just in case we want to work with this design again, let’s save the layers we’ve been working with.  Click on “File” on the top toolbar, and scroll down to “save as.”  Pick a folder, and give the design a name, such as, “teal urn painting layers.”

If you’re happy with your design, go to the top toolbar, and click on “Layers.”  Scroll down and click on “flatten image.”  The whole design is one layer now.

Click on “File” on the top toolbar, and scroll to save as.  Pick the folder you saved the layers to, and give your design a unique name so you know the difference between the two saves.

We might use this urn at a later date in a different lesson.

Check out DIY Graphics: A Beginner’s PhotoShop Tutorial for more Photoshop Elements info.

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