Step-by-step:

Build your custom brush library

1 One way to quickly collect a lot of useful Photoshop brushes is to download free stock ones from useful sites such as brusheezy.com and myphotoshopbrushes.com. These sites provide a wide variety of brushes and brush libraries with many different uses. When collecting brushes from the web, I select which brushes I want and create custom libraries with them. 2 To create custom brushes, I take a photo or a custompainted shape or texture and convert it to black and white. Then I select it with the Rectangular Marquee tool and go to Edit>Define Brush Preset and give it a useful name that will enable me to find it easily. In the Brush window I can customise the brush’s settings such as Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture and so on. 3 I also use Photoshop’s default brushes that have extra useful customisable tip options. These can be changed dynamically with a stylus and hotkeys as I paint, such as the Hardness, Softness, Angle and Roundness. To customise a pre- existing Photoshop brush, I select it from the Brush Preset dialog and adjust its properties in the Brush Tip Shape section of the Brush window. 4 To organise brushes into an easy-to-browse brush library, I open the Brush Presets window, click the icon in the upper- right corner and select Brush Preset Manager. From there I Ctrl+click to select each brush that I want to save into a new customised brush library and then click Save Set. I also add the name and edit the order of the brushes in the Brush Preset Manager.