Turn Your Doodles into Photoshop Brush

Lately I've been experimenting with some techniques to turn my doodle into a believable Photoshop brushes. This may not be the most perfect way but I'm still learning (And people did say that nothing is perfect). Let's just hope it'll get better in the future. So, for those who like to scribble random stuffs instead of listening to your teacher mumbling about ancient history, algebra or things you don't care about, here's a way to turn that doodle art into Photoshop brushes. Now, everybody can benefit from your constant lack of attention in class.


Turn your doodle into Photoshop Brush


1. Obviously, you have to scribble something on a piece of paper. If you're more of a spontaneous type, you can straight away use a gel pen (preferably black) to make your doodle. Otherwise, you can use pencil first, then trace it carefully with a gel pen.

2. Scan your doodle. Save it in a format that can be opened in Photoshop ie. pdf or jpeg. Set the resolution to 300 dpi.

3. Open your scanned doodle in Photoshop. File > Open > select the file to open.



4. Create a new file. File > New. For now, I'm gonna choose the document size as below. If you're planning to create a bigger brush, choose a bigger document size.



5. On your Toolbar, select the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M).



6. On your scanned doodle, use the Marquee Tool to select an item. I'm gonna start with the cute little cupcake. Copy the selection (CTRL+C) and paste it (CTRL+V) on your new document that you've created in step 4.



7. Eliminate the unwanted area using the Eraser Tool. Or you can always select that area using Marquee Tool and hit the DELETE key on your keyboard.



8. Sure some of you can go ahead and save what you have now as a new brush.
But I'm gonna show you some additional tips on how to create a very smooth and high contrast doodle brush.

9. Go to Edit > Transform > Scale (or shortcut CTRL+T). Resize your image to 70% or 80%.



10. Next, you need to delete the white background. To easily identify the white area that needs to be deleted, I've created a color fill layer and place it underneath my image layer.



With your image layer selected, choose the Magic Wand Tool (W).



Click on the white area with the Magic Wand to select the area. Then, hit the DELETE key on your keyboard. Repeat this step until all white areas are eliminated.



11. Go to Image > Adjustment > Levels. Move the black slider to the right until you get a high contrast image.



12. Go to Filter > Stylize > Diffuse. Choose Anisotropic. This will smooth out the line of your sketch.



13. Duplicate your image layer. And set the duplicate layer to Multiply. This will add further contrast to your sketch.



14. Click on the eye icon beside the Color Fill Layer to make that layer invisible. Now you're left with the white background again.



15. It's time to save your doodle as brush. Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give your new brush a cool name and hit OK. Now you can use this newly created brush when you select the brush tool.

16. Go ahead and create some other brushes from your doodles. Finally, let me show you how to save several brushes into one set. For instance, you have 10 different cupcakes brushes and you would like to save them in one .abr file. So that, when you post this file on the web, people can just download this one file and get all the 10 brushes in one set.

Go to Edit > Preset Manager. Choose Brush as preset type. CTRL + click on the brushes you want to include in the set. Then, hit the "Save Set" button. Save it to your brush folder.