Custom Brushes

Photoshop brushes are an imitation of real brushes, but you have the possibility to give them the shape you prefer defining your own custom brushes.

This means that yes, you can draw using any kind of shape.

Here I'll show you how to create a shissors-shaped brush.

Save to your computer the photo of these scissors and open it in Photoshop.

Thanks to morguefile.com for the original photo.

You must fully desaturate the image: to do this go to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate

This particular image is black and grey so you hardly can notice any effect, this is used to remove the color from images and must be done if your image has colors.

Now go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and move the sliders until you reach the point where you have the less grey possible

I obtained this image choosing Brightness +58 and Contrast +91

Now you're done with the image manipulation and you are ready to create your brush.

Hit Edit > Define Brush Preset, type the name you want your brush to have and press enter.

Now you can find your brush at the bottom of the list, just select the brush tool and press the down-arrow in the top bar.

If you want you can remove all the other brushes loaded by default (right click the brush and hit Delete Brush)

and, once you have some brushes you'd like to save, open the brushes menu and click Save Brushes

The brush set will be saved to a .abr file that you will be able to load choosing Load Brushes from the brushes menu.