From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

769 Painting mandala-style dot patterns

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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769 Painting mandala-style dot patterns

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- [Instructor] All right, now I'm going to show you how to add these dot patterns right here, in which the dots appear to grow and then shrink. And these are actually pressure sensitive brushstrokes, believe it or not. And I'll also show you how to augment your artwork using the eraser tool, which is also capable of painting symmetrically inside Photoshop CC 2019. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over to my less remarkable artwork in progress. Although, it will be remarkable once we're done. And then, I'll just go ahead and zoom in on an area of the artwork that's a little bit empty, such as the top right corner. And then, I'll select my brush tool, which again, you can get by pressing the B key. Now, for some reason, your symmetry has gotten turned off. And you can turn it off deliberately, by the way, by clicking on the little butterfly up here in the Options bar and choosing this first command, Symmetry Off, at which point, notice, if I go ahead and paint, I just get a standard brushstroke. Don't like that, so I'll undo that guy. And I'll turn things on again by clicking on a butterfly and choosing Last Used Symmetry. And now, if I were to paint in a new brushstroke like so, then I will paint in a bunch of symmetrical brushstrokes in the other corners of my artwork. However, I want to paint in some pressure-sensitive dots, and so, I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Brush Settings command in order to bring up this panel right here. And notice this spacing value. If I crank the value upward, you can see my previewed changes from a continuous brushstroke to a bunch of dots instead. And I eventually came up with the spacing value of 150%. Although, obviously, you can experiment to your heart's content with that one. And now, notice if I were to paint inside my artwork, then I would paint a bunch of dots instead. Now, I'm going to increase the size of my brush by pressing the right bracket key a few times. And then, I'll paint once again. And the reason that the dots are getting bigger and smaller is because I am painting with a pressure-sensitive stylus. All right, so I'm just painting in a bunch of arbitrary brushstrokes at this point in time, as you can see. And so, I'll just go ahead and scroll down here and paint in a few more. And we're just going to fast-forward through things to make this process a little bit less painful from your angle as a viewer. All right, now I'm going to zoom out so we can take in the entire artwork. And if something like this happens to you, where you can't see a big chunk of your artwork, don't panic, it's just a screen redraw problem, which you can fix very easily by turning the layer off here inside the Layers panel, and then turning it back on. And now, I'm going to create another layer by pressing Control + Shift + N or Command + Shift + N on a Mac. And I'm going to call this guy more dots because that's the function it's going to serve. And then, I'll go ahead and click OK. And I want to hide those blue lines. So I'll click on the butterfly once again and choose Hide Symmetry down here from the bottom of the menu. And I'll press the right bracket key a few more times to further increase the size of my brush. And now, I'll just go ahead and paint a bunch of dots all over the place, as you see me doing right here. And the reason I'm painting these big dots is because not only do I want to I fill in the artwork, but I also want to show you how you can work with the eraser tool. And so, I'll go ahead and bring back that Brush Settings panel right there, and I'll reduce the spacing value back down to 10%. And I'm going to leave the panel up on screen for a moment while I paint some very big, thick brushstrokes here. And notice that Photoshop is having a little bit of trouble keeping up with me. So you can see how my cursor is moved well beyond the brushstroke at this point of time. And so, you are going to have to let the program catch up with you every once in a while. And now, I'll just go ahead and draw another thick brushstroke, such as this one right here. All right, now let's say you want to brush things back just a little bit. Well, thanks to the fact that we're working on an independent layer, you can go ahead and erase those latest brushstrokes using the eraser tool. And so, I'll go ahead and switch over to that tool, which you can get by pressing the E key. And then, thanks to the fact that the Brush Settings panel is still up on screen, I can confirm the size, which I'd like to bring up to 30 pixels. And you can also see that by default, the hardness of the eraser's 100%, which is great. The spacing is too high for starters here, so I'll go ahead and take it down to 10%, and then, I will hide my Brush Settings panel. And just to make sure that things are working the way they should, click on the butterfly icon up here in the Options bar once again, and choose Last Used Symmetry so that the eraser tool is also painting symmetrical brushstrokes. And then, you can paint through your most recent brushstrokes as you see me doing here. It might make a little more sense if I zoom in a little bit because after all, there's a heck of a lot of stuff going on on screen here. And see how this dot is overlapping the nine? In this case, the nine is backwards. But if I paint away that dot on that nine, it disappears from this nine down here as well. All right, so I'm just going to paint a few more stripes through these brushstrokes. And notice that I'm only affecting those brushstrokes on this particular layer, whether they're solid or dotted. Now, you can also erase with dots if you like. And to do so, all you need to do is bring back that Brush Settings panel, and then, again, I will go ahead and crank that spacing value up to 150%. And now, because I no longer need that panel, I'll just go ahead and hide it. And I will paint inside this brushstroke right here. So notice that I'm starting with a hard pressure, and then I'm letting up so that my dots are growing smaller. Here, I'm going to start light and then press harder as I go so that I have tiny dots at the beginning and increasingly large dots toward the end. All right, so I'll go and move this guy down here. And once again, we're going to fast-forward a little bit through things to make the viewing experience less painful and to allow me to create some artwork that isn't all together hideous-looking. And so, I should mention that while you can attempt to paint dotted holes inside your dotted brushstrokes, you're probably not going to get any kind of reliable alignment. All right, I'll press Control, zero, or Command, zero on a Mac to zoom out. And that is how you both paint and erase mandala-style dot patterns by increasing the spacing value in the Brush Settings panel here inside Photoshop CC 2019 and later. Next week, I'll show you how to take your black and white artwork and render it in full color.

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