Tutorial Links: Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4

Learn how to make a custom brush and then use it to create vibrant, freehand paintings. This tutorial gives a breakdown of how I created one of my pictures, with some helpful tips along the way.-Troy Packer

Freehand Painting with Photoshop

For this tutorial I decided to paint freehand with Adobe Photoshop, rather than my usual method of scanning in a pencil sketch and using the smudge tool to get the blending effect.
The whole process was done on the fly with no references or pre planning. I went with a painterly style to give it a fresher, more lively look.
This method took a bit longer to complete as opposed to my usual way of doing things, but the end result has a lot more punch to it.

I suggest you read through the entire tutorial before you begin...

Step 1. The Custom Brush

The first thing I did for this tutorial was create a custom brush. You can use the default brushes if you like, but if you want to have more control over the final look of your images, then custom brushes are the way to go.

The image below left shows my final freehand painting. The image is being displayed here at 25%. The image below right is a portion of the image at 100%. You can see dynamic quality of the custom brush. It gives the picture a very organic texture, very similar to an image created with traditional mediums rather than digital.

To create the custom brush...

Create a new psd at 300 dpi with a white background.
Using different sized soft brushes, randomly paint dots in a small area. See the image below. This is the brush I created and used (shown at 100%).
Now take the Rectangular Marquee Tool and make a selection around the dots.
Finally, in the Edit menu, near the bottom, is the Create Custom Brush option.

Step 2. The Picture Plan

It is important to have rough plan of how your picture is going to turn out...unless you are going to do a completely random abstract piece. A rough plan will show the basic composition of the picture, even though you may change it as the picture develops.

As my image was going to be a front view of a face, it was also important to have a certain level of symmetry.

Open a new psd and create a new layer above the background layer.
Hit Ctrl R to bring up the ruler.
Click and drag from inside the side ruler through to the middle of your image to create a Guide Line (it should snap there).
With any colour and a reasonably small brush (hard or soft, doesn’t matter) rough out the shape of your image. If you are creating an image that is going to be roughly symmetrical then obviously just draw on one side. See the image below left.

To complete the symmetrical design...
Duplicate the outline layer and go to Edit> Transform> Flip Horizontal.
Move the newly flipped outline layer to match up to the original to complete the face. The Guide Line should help the two layers snap together.
Merge the two outline layers, and drop the opacity a bit. The rough plan layer will be discarded before too long.
Hit Ctrl H to hide the Guide Line, as this is no longer needed.

Finally change the background colour to something more appropriate. I chose a fairly dark blue as I wanted this colour to influence the whole image. See the image above.

This is the rough plan done!
This time spent creating the rough plan is going to save you a lot of time in the next stage Step 3. The Painting > >