Customize Brushes - part 1

First thing to do is to open a new photoshop file. Make sure it is in grayscale mode, and make it 100px by 100px.

This step requires just a little bit of artistic ability, so if that is not your strength, just do your best. Take a 3 pixel, 100% hardness brush and draw in a few birds in varying positions. You could do just one bird, but you will get a slightly more realistic looking flock if you put a few different ones. If you are really having difficulty drawing some birds, I 'm sure you can find some on the internet and then make a brush from those (see other brush making tutorial: http://www.photoshoptalent.com/photoshop-tutorials/create-your-own-brush-library.php)

Once you are happy with your birds, go to Edit, Define Brush Preset. Another dialogue box will pop up and you can give you brush a name if you wish.

Now when you go to your brush selections, you will find your bird brush as one of the options. It should be the very last brush on the list! Select that brush and get ready to customize!!!

Now look for your brushes panel. It is normally located in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click on the brushes tab and start customizing. I will not go into detail for all of the settings, however, below is a brief description of each setting:

Brush Tip Shape:
allows you to change the angle, roundness, hardness and spacing of your initial brush tip shape.

Shape Dynamics:
includes size, angle and roundness jitter. Makes it possible to randomize the shape of your initial brush, we will be using this for our brush later.

Scattering:
this makes it so that your brush tip shape is not placed on the canvas in a straight line, we will also be using this to customize our brush.

Texture:
this makes it possible to overlay a texture onto your brush.

Dual Brush:
a very cool feature that allows you to combine two different brushes. It even allows you to change how to two interact. We will not get into this setting in this tutorial, but mess around with it...it's very cool.

Color Dynamics:
allows you to use both foreground and background color on your brush as well as randomizing the hue, saturation and brightness.

Other Dynamics:
allows you to change the opacity and flow of the brush. We will also use this for our brush.

Noise, Wet Edges, Airbrush, Smoothing and Protect Texture do not provide additional options, but they do basically what the names say.

As a side note, if you have a tablet, there is also the ability to control most of these features with pen pressure, tilt, etc.