Hints and Tips for Michelle’s “Rain” Brushes.
Welcome to Mellowbutterfly’s first tutorial! We’re covering basic information on working with brushes in this post, specifically Michelle’s “Rain” brush available in the shoppe. For those of you experienced with brushes, you might just want to check out the pictures for some inspiration. For those of you who maybe aren’t so familiar or don’t know how to start using these specific brushes, hopefully this will help a little!
There are all sorts of brushes that can be used for scrapbook layouts. Ones that look like regular stamped images (symbols, word art, etc), ones that can be used to add texture and depth to elements like background papers and embellishments and natural brushes that mimic certain scenes from nature, to name a few.
No matter what program you work with, there are two specific ways of applying brushes to your work. One way is by “stamping” with a specifically-designed stamp brush; this is literally a “one-click” image that you stamp onto your work with your paintbrush tool much as you would a real stamp with ink on paper. The other way of applying brushes to your work is painting with what’s known as a dynamic brush. These are brushes that are designed for the artist to paint with rather than just stamp.
Michelle’s rain brush is a great example of a brush set that provides both stamp and dynamic brushes. These brushes aren’t just pictures or textures, but representations of elements of nature. This is a brush that would often leave people wondering how on earth to effectively use it and get a worthwhile result and we’ve recently had a question from our own ‘Flygirl Scribbler as to how to do just that.
As I mentioned above, the rain brush has a mix of stamp brushes and dynamic and it would be worthwhile having a play with them to see how they work before attempting anything else. These are fairly simple brushes so you don’t need a tablet and stylus to use even the dynamic ones. Go play now, I’ll be here when you’re done.
(Tip: The thicker, bolder brushes are dynamic, the lighter ones are stamps.)
Finished? Familiar with them all? Cool, let’s continue.
A good place to start when using any natural brush is to remember what the elements look like in reality. Rain is very reflective. It can also fall in showers so light it almost looks like mist and it can be so heavy that it impairs vision. It falls in the direction of the wind. When you look at it, it’s three-dimensional – droplets up close look bigger, droplets far away look smaller, especially in heavy rain.
Here’s a really excellent photograph of all sorts of real rain…
As you can see, the rain further away is finer and looks lighter, but the rain closer to the camera is heavier. The rain is also catching the light making it easier to view.
Keeping that in mind, I am going to add rain to a digital scene I created from a composite of different photographs and brushes:
First I want to create an image that gives the overall effect of rain coming down, so I selected one of the finer, lighter brushes in the set and applied it with a couple of clicks (stamp) to cover the image where I think the rain would show most:
As you can see, now it looks like it’s raining out over the rocks and it looks especially effective because it’s catching the light of the moon against the dark background.
Then I wanted to add some dimension to the rain, to make the audience feel like they could very well be standing out in the weather – that means rain that falls closer to the foreground is bigger:
To get the above effect, I simply painted the rain in one smooth swipe of the mouse across the picture in the general area of where I wanted the rain to fall and as you can see, it looks like a fairly realistic representation of the real thing.
You can also use these rain brushes on plainer background papers for your scrapbooking layouts to make moody backdrops for your photographs.
The two pictures below are ones I created using Michelle’s Rembrandt distressed paper and the rain brushes. One is just the paper and the rain, the other has another cloudy sky brush applied to give the paper more depth and a bit more of a scene:
Please be aware that there is no right or wrong way to using these or any other brushes in your work. What I’ve described in this tutorial is what works for me as a digital artist and scrapbooker. Hopefully it is a stepping stone for your own creativity. Of course, if you use any of Michelle’s awesome brushes, do let us know and leave a link to your work in the comments!
