My Setup ❤︎ (part 2 - Photoshop - brushes & tools) + doodles (Patreon)

This is part 2 of explaining my setup - just trying to be informative and answer questions people have asked me over the years! Today I’ll go into my Photoshop setup, my brush setup, and what other programs I occasionally use. Plus, what I think of these things and what they’re useful for! ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡

Photoshop ⋆˚࿔

This is how I like to keep my Photoshop laid out:

And here is the panels labelled:

After lots of tweaking, this is what works best for me to keep my workflow efficient. I’ll explain why I keep each panel open:

Navigator: I use a screen tablet, and often I’ll drag the navigator to my main monitor to keep an eye on the colours, since my screen tablet has a worse colour display than a good monitor, lol.

Colour: I keep this open to choose a colour easily. I have mine set to display CMYK sliders, so if you want to tweak a colour, it’s so easy. I’m constantly using these sliders while painting to shift my hue and brightness.

Brushes + brush settings: I find if I don’t just have my brushes panel open 24/7, I won’t ever change up brushes, which I like to do because it gives art that textured feel. I keep the Brush Settings open in the same group so I can easily tweak brushes, since if you use a panel a lot but you don’t have space for it, you keep having to close it. That’s the benefit of tab groubs!

Character + Paragraph: These are essential to doing any text, for example in comics or graphics. Character controls the font, font size, etc, and Paragraph controls stuff like line spacing.

Layers + Properties: Keeping the layers panel open is a no brainer, but I also have Properties here, since I’m often using stuff like Gradient Maps and Adjustment Layers.

The digital process is always the same for me: sketching on top of sketching. I use the same tools in every program.

Pen settings ⋆.˚

For lineart, one tip I feel like I cannot live without (regardless of program) is adjusting my pen tip feel. A firmer/harder pen will mean that you have a thinner line, and much more pressure control. I want to press extremely lightly to make a thin line, but be able to press hard and make a really thick one. Having a soft brush means you get a big blob of a line.

I mostly have opacity turned off on my ink brushes. It makes me more intentional with lines, though it is a bit more challenging sometimes. The other thing is that we need to save our wrists as artists - so pressing really hard all the time is a no-go.

During painting is when I switch up my brush completely:

I often use a huge range of brushes designed to mimic real paint. Though most often for colouring, I just use the square brush with colour shift added! That allows me to get colour blocked in so fast, and have variance in hue that adds that colourful look:

And here's another one of the brushes I'm constantly using: the same brush, but with 'Apply Per Tip' enabled. This allows for Hue Jitter within the brush stroke itself.

For blending, I mostly use the Mixer Brush tool. (Pictured below) It gives paintings this wet oil-paint look, and allows me to control the blend, while also just leaving a lot up to chance, since I like the painterly look. I also use the smudge tool to feather stuff. Here’s an example of the difference in effects:

Lazy Nezumi ⋆.˚

Speaking of smoothing, I’m not sure how popular this program already is, but I can’t recommend it enough. Lazy Nezumi is something I use for brush smoothing and perspective grids/rulers. You do have to pay for it, but it’s relatively cheap and it’s a one off payment.

It looks like this when I use it for smoothing:

Nezumi's smoothing algorithm works much better than the native Photoshop smoothing in my opinion. There’s also just more settings to customise, and many other smoothing modes to choose from.

It's also got tonnes of rulers, which come in SO handy during drawing comics. Above is a small demonstration of how Lazy Nezumi looks when used for perspective drawing, and some examples of where I used it recently. In comics, since I hate using 3D, and drawing backgrounds is non negotiable, having a perspective guide becomes absolutely essential to not ripping my hair out.

Brushes ⋆.˚

I’ve been building a collection of Photoshop brushes for like 15 years, so when people ask ‘what brushes do you use’, it’s really hard to answer. I’ve picked and rooted through so many downloads, altered ones, made my own, etc, so now I couldn’t possibly share my collection without giving tonnes of other people’s mixed up sets without their permission. This is a great free set for painting that I have. And these look great for inking, I just downloaded them to try;

The thing about brushes is… at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. It matters much more what you do with it, and getting practice. Just using the hard round brush, you could do everything you needed:

And below is the drawing - but with textured brushes added into the inks. As you can see, it wasn’t necessary, but adds a lot.

Other programs ⋆.˚

Clip Studio Paint and Procreate are the two other programs I use, both on my ipad. Procreate has become so much more popular lately, probably because it’s so accessible. I have to say, I really hate Procreate’s interface. As you can tell by this post, I’m a die hard Photoshop user (fuck Adobe though), and I just feel like Procreate took everything that’s common in a drawing program and switched it all up for the funsies. Stuff is missing, weirdly un-intuitive, annoyingly simplified. It just gives me a headache watching people get around the progam’s lack of features with little hacks.

I just export anything I draw there to finish in Photoshop, where I actually have control. Procreate feels like more like an app than a full fledged drawing program, but then I suppose the simplicity makes it easier to open up and doodle in. Procreate does have really nice default brushes too, and it’s a one off payment, unlike Clip Studio’s current subscription model.

This was drawn in Clip Studio. One advantage it has over Procreate is the marketplace for assets. There’s soooo many nice inking brushes and screentones in there - so many that I really could never actually use everything I downloaded, LOL. The interface is much more useful than Procreate’s in my experience, giving you a closer experience to Photoshop with text tools, and just lots more tools/menus in general.

That's all for today! Hope this was helpful! ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ