Paint Shop Pro 7 Tutorial: Making Brushes

This tutorial shows you how to create your own custom brushes and brush sets in PSP7. So you know how to use brushes now. But what about making them yourself? This tutorial was written by my friend Eliza for my old graphics site ere-serene.org. Go tell her what a wonderful job she did!

This first step is optional, but it ought to make your life easier. Go into your brushes folder (it ought to be somewhere like c:\Program Files\Jasc\Paint Shop Pro 7\Brushes\) and create two new folders--one for the storage of your completed brush sets, and one as a temp folder for creation of brushes.

The reason you want two different folders is this: When you create a new custom brush image in Paint Shop Pro, it adds it to a file called UBrush.jbr in the current "save to" folder. Every time you add a new brush to the brush set, it will amend UBrush.jbr. When you're done with a brush set, you'll want to rename UBrush.jbr to something else, and move it into your completed brush folder. I suggest that you keep your custom brushes in a different folder, because it's a little easier to keep track of them when they're not mixed up with other people's brushes.

Now, open up Paint Shop Pro, and select the paintbrush tool. Open the Brush Types menu and hit "Custom..." and then choose "Edit Paths". Set one of the three available folders to your temporary brush folder and select "Enable Path" and "Save to Path." I suggest disabling the rest of the brush paths.

Now that you have that set up, you're ready to create a custom brush image. In Paint Shop Pro 7, the largest size a brush can be is 255x255, so make a new image set to those dimensions, 16 million colors, and with a white background. (White translates to transparent in a brush, and any space your image doesn't take up should naturally be transparent.) Draw or paste your brush image into this new image.

Perfect the image, and then go to the Colors menu and select "Greyscale." The image will become black and white; this is what your brush will look like when painted with a black brush on a white background. Select white as your background color, and then crop the image down to the smallest size you can get it. (It pays to be frugal with disk space) My favorite way to do this is to select the white area around the brush image, go to the Selections menu and choose "Invert," and then open that same menu again and choose "Crop to Selection."

Now, select the entire image (either by going to Selections > "Select All" or by pressing CTRL+A). Choose the paintbrush tool, and open the Brush Types menu and choose Custom. Now all you have to do is press "Create."

And you've just made a little custom paintbrush! Repeat the above process to make other brushes that will belong to the set. When you're finished with the set and want to close it off (and possibly offer it up for download), open up your temp folder in the My Computer menu from your desktop. Rename UBrush.jbr to the filename of your choice, and move it to your brush folder.

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