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Has it really already been a couple of months since my last post? I’m sorry — I got caught up in other projects and discouraged about this one, for no good reason really. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get anything done by Friday, but I feel the urge to break my absent streak today, so for now let me give a present to the Photoshop users among you: the brushes I made when I did the ancient Greek peplos. Although I did the work of making them into brushes, I used the original patterns from a public domain book, The Costume of the Ancients, so I think it’s only right to pass the derivative work back into the public domain. Here’s the link to the zip file.
To install the brushes, just unzip the file, put the .abr file in your Brushes directory (for me, it’s under Presets), and restart Photoshop if necessary.
Free for personal and commercial uses, attribution appreciated but unnecessary, and if you change the brushes yourself, please keep the terms the same. To put it in Creative Common terms:
Liana’s Ancient Greek Pattern Brushes by Liana Kerr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at lianaspaperdolls.com.
I released it this way because I hate remembering where I got a particular brush and whether or not it’s OK to use for a project I’d like to make money off of, but if you use any of these brushes in your own work I’d certainly like to see how they turn out!
The brushes are a little on the large size, but I tend to use them at much smaller sizes, which is where they’ll probably look best. Feel free to ask if you have questions! (I may add a tutorial on using them later, but for now…)
Today’s Tiny Tutorial is very tiny indeed, but it’s a very useful technique in my bag of paperdolling tricks, and I wanted to put it up so I can refer to it in future tutorials. Now, I hesitate to do Photoshop tutorials because I’m hardly an expert myself, plus I work with Photoshop CS2, which is nearly a decade old, and I can’t promise that what I do is the best way to do things — or even accurate — for newer versions. Still, if someone can make good use of my techniques or the tutorial sparks someone’s imagination and that person improves on my techniques, then I believe it’s worthwhile.
In effect, when I draw the line I’m drawing tons of little circles overlapping each other so that it looks like a solid line. What I want is to move those circles apart so that they don’t overlap, which will make it look like beads. So let’s look at the brush settings window. See the “spacing” setting? Right now, it’s at 25%, and that makes them spaced close enough together to look like a solid line. So all we have to do is…
Increase the spacing. At 105%, each individual brushstroke is far enough apart from the next one that there’s a little space between it.
First, let’s change the color with color overlay. I’m going to make this row of beads look golden, so I’m going to start with a warm golden brown base (#d28a00).
To give the beads shape, I generally play around with bevel and emboss, inner shadow, inner glow and drop shadow until I come up with an effect I like. For this example, I’ve just used 
When using this, you’ll want to keep in mind how big you want the beads to be, because the layer style changes drastically with the size of the brush. Using that same layer style with a 5 pixel wide brush only gives me a muddy brown line.
I have to 
With your brush created and your layer style made, all you have to do is draw your beads the way you want them. You can draw freehand, and I tend to use paths or shapes for this, to keep the lines nice and smooth or to be able to accurately go over the same area multiple times with different brushes; paths are well beyond the scope of this tutorial, however! (I used one of the default Photoshop shapes, set as a path, to create the sun symbol at the top of this post.)
