Chopper Brushes

Here are a few aircraft and helicopter Photoshop brushes I’ve made from some U.S Government DOD EPS images. I hope you find them useful.

iPhone E6B

Even though I’m not flying currently due to economic conditions, I may have to get this pilot gadget just for the sake of the cool interface the developers implemented. For the uninitiated ground-pounder, it’s a pilot’s flight calculator that takes the place of a unique and surprisingly fun to use, circular slide rule called an E6B.

The interface of this iPhone PFMA is modeled to have the same look and feel of a Flight Management System (FMS) that you might find in a commercial aircraft. When you consider that the metal version costs about $25.00, and a student grade cardboard E6B costs about $12.00, you can’t ask for a better bargain than $6.00. John Ewing over at Aviation Mentor gives it a very favorable recommendation and that’s enough for me.

Photoshop Brushes

Here are a few fighter plane Photoshop brushes I’ve created for your use. An F-15 Eagle, F-16 Falcon, A-10 Warthog and an F-4 Phantom. Click on the image below to download.

Caveman Cartoon

Here’s a recent cartoon for a little league soccer team. I’ve also recently started using a brush pen for inking. It seems to give me a smoother and more dynamic line than the steel nibs. It’s very easy to get a broad stroke and transition to a fine line. It also encourages me to be looser with my inks and I like that.

Illustrator Brushes

Here are a couple of quick Illustrator brushes for you to use in any way you like. Click on the image below to download.

Photoshop Selections

Part 3

Type

The Type tool contains a flyout showing a dotted ‘T’. With this tool active, when you type text in the dialog box and hit OK, instead of foreground colored text appearing on your image, the text appears as “marching ants”, or as an active selection ready for your command.

Magic Wand

The Magic Wand sees an image as composed of shades of gray (0-255), even though what you see may be in color. When we specify a number in the dialog box, we are really telling the magic wand how many values of grays to select. The higher the Tolerance number, the wider the range of values that will be selected.
To use the wand, just input a number into the Tolerance dialog box and click in the area to be selected. An contiguous area of color with all of the pixels within the Tolerance limit will be selected. If your selection isn’t quite right, you may have to adjust the Tolerance number up or down, or choose Select>Grow or Select>Similar.
Add non-contiguous areas to the selection by Shift-clicking. The Anti-aliased checkbox is used to select Anti-aliased images (blurred edges when viewed close up, a technique to smooth edges).
The Sample Merged checkbox tells Photoshop to use either all visible layers when making a selection, or only the active
layer.

Color Range

Color Range is very close to the magic wand in effect, but learning to use it is a little more tricky. Select>Color Range will bring up the preview window showing a grayscale version of your image. The Fuzziness slider can be thought of like the Tolerance number of the magic wand: it limits the range of colors selected.
But it will also select the color range sampled with the eyedropper, over the entire image, not just contiguous areas, very much like Select>Similar.
Selections created here are based on all visible layers, so unwanted layers need to be made temporarily invisible by turning off their “eye” in the layers palette. White areas in the preview window are selected and gray areas are partially selected.
To add or subtract a range of color in the selection, use either the + or – eyedroppers, or you can click and drag the plain eyedropper using Shift to add, or Option to subtract. Expanding your options even more, you can use the Fuzziness slider to fine-tune your selection, and you also have the choice of making your selection based on specific colors, or by value: Highlights, Midtones or Shadows.

Photoshop Brushes

Presenting ten Photoshop brushes for you to use any way you like. Click on the preview image below to download the zipped .abr file. I hope you find them useful.

Photoshop Selections

Part 2

Lasso

The Lasso tool is one of the ways we can make more intricate selections. There are actually 2 lasso tools: the freeform version and the polygon version. The flyout (hold down the mouse key over the tool) will show the version not currently in use.

The freeform lasso traces your selection as you hold the mouse button and drag around the outline of your selection. When the mouse button is released, the selection closes itself  using a direct line from the release point to the start point.

With the polygon lasso, best results are usually achieved with a series of mouse clicks, drawing the overall shape with a clicks and short lines.

Pen

The Pen tool comes with 5 options in the flyout: the basic pen, the selection arrow, add point pen, delete point pen and the convert point tool.

Vaguely similar to the lasso tools, the pen differs by drawing with points or nodes that have handles, creating Bezier curves which can be fine-tuned to create intricate curves later with the other pen tools or move tool as needed.

To draw a Bezier curve with the pen tool, click and drag the resulting handles to position the curve.

Reposition the node or control handles to modify the curve as needed using the Direct Selection tool, or change the curve node to a corner node with the Convert Node tool, by clicking the node once. Add nodes to a path or subtract them by clicking with the plus or minus versions of the pen.

Flip Jig

In preparation for some video posts showing how I draw my cartoons, I thought I’d show how I’ve rigged a swing arm lamp, minus the bulb and shade, with a flexible rubber tripod for a Flip digital camcorder. The articulated legs of the tripod wrap around the head of the lamp and hold the camera in place very securely. The arm of the lamp has a couple of tension knobs that lock it in place right over my drawings.

If you’re familiar with the Flip, you can see the camera is upside down relative to the drawings, but I’ll be using iMovie to edit and rotate the video so that it appears right side up.

Drawing Tablet

So you think you might benefit from using a tablet instead of a mouse for cartooning? Well, to tell the truth up front, I wouldn’t work without one. It’s convenient, feels natural, and gives much more control when compared to working with a mouse, and there are a number of things a tablet will do that are impossible or nearly so with a traditional pen or brush.

If you are using Photoshop with just a mouse, you are missing out on a lot of features that a tablet makes possible. Beyond that, and in more practical terms, many users swear that their symptoms of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome caused by using a mouse have been eliminated by switching to a tablet.

A tablet is fairly easy to work with if you have a reasonable amount of eye/hand coordination, and if you are an artist, that should be a reasonable assumption. The tablet proportions can be set to approximate your screen, making it easy to navigate. In other words, if you touch the middle of the tablet with the pen, the cursor will jump to the middle of the screen.

Or if you prefer, the settings can be altered to act in the same fashion as an ordinary mouse, requiring you to sweep the cursor from one point to the next. Once you have established your preference and found a comfortable position for the tablet on your desk, it quickly becomes second nature to pick up the pen and begin working with nary a glance to the tablet itself. It simply becomes an extension of your hand.

Although the great majority of my cartoons begin as pencil sketches on paper and go through the entire process of inking and scanning, sometimes it is faster for simple or smaller images to skip the paper step and be drawn completely with the tablet. This eliminates pencil smudges, stray lines and a lot of the cleanup time needed during the scanning process, but even though it has a certain advantage in speed, the look of a cartoon is slightly affected by not sitting at a slanted drawing table with pen on paper. The muscle movement is different and it shows. With that in mind, I generally my limit tablet drawing to small cartoons or icons.

One of the most useful features of a tablet is pressure sensitivity. The pressure preferences can be adjusted to control brush size, opacity, color and more, as you work, or any combination of these. It’s a very convenient and intuitive feature and one I use constantly.

If you’ve made up your mind and have your heart set on buying a tablet, you’ll need to decide which size will be right for you. Even if money is no object (and if it isn’t, more power to you), keep in mind that getting the biggest size available might not be the right choice. Unlike a monitor where bigger is better, a tablet is a hands-on device and it’s important to get one that fits you and your working space.

A large tablet will require larger arm movements for the cursor to travel from one side of the screen to the other, and the tablet itself will take up more premium real estate on your desktop. Personally, I’ve found that the mid-size 6″x8″ version is a good fit for me and my desk. Other artists prefer to work with the tablet in their lap instead of on their desk and a larger tablet is preferable to them.