Photoshop & Illustrator Brushes and Swatches

There's always something new to learn about Photoshop and Illustrator. Thank goodness for the internet and fabulous free resources!

I downloaded a bunch of Photoshop brush settings from Colorburned, including ones to create coffee stains and tapes. At left is an example of the tape brush I used to create my Tinted Mint ad for Scout Magazine (look for my ad in the November and December issue). This tape brush is perfect for my Tinted Mint shop so I will definitely use it more often.

Also handy in creating this ad is the background image I downloaded from Shutterstock. While this was not free, I subscribed to their 1 month plan with up to 25 images/day and took full advantage, minus a few. I Photoshopped in the washi tapes and little flags on the cupcakes. Et voilà, my beautiful ad!

I was looking online to see if there is an easy way to create scalloped edges in Illustrator. Wavy zigzag just isn't the look I wanted. So I came upon tutorials about creating pattern swatches. Wish I learned about this sooner when creating print repeats. Before, I would manually tile repeats across a 1 meter length for textile prints, creating huge files for the manufacturer. Now I can just create one single repeat, save it as a pattern swatch, which will automatically tile across any size space needed. 

Here's an example of a traditional Japanese print based on my Yagasuri washi tape, created in Illustrator (seems so easy, but it took me a while to figure out repeat alignment):