Coffee Stain Brushes

It's almost Midnight and I have to work tomorrow and I SHOULD be in bed, but I thought I'd do a quick post about some nifty free brushes I found.

I am NOT good at using brushes. I use them occasionally but haven't really discovered what they can do. Hopefully we can get into brushes in more detail in the near future. BUT--I was working on this page and I just wanted a really nice natural looking coffee stain on the page. I hoped to find a tutorial on how to create on in Photoshop--but instead discovered this awesome little freebie, and I thought I'd share it with you...

Coffee Stain Brushes

Here's just a very quick sample I made in about 10 seconds. Awesome.

If you have never used brushes, I hope to have a much more detailed lesson in a future post. But here's the quick run-down:

When you have found a brush file online that you would like to download, like the one at the link above, download and unzip it. I unzip it in my "Brushes" file in photoshop.

In Photoshop, click on the Brush tool.

In the upper bar, pull down the brush selector and click on the small arrow on the right. Choose "Load Brushes" from the list.

Go to where you have saved the unzipped brushes and open it. Your new brushes should appear. As you can see in the photo, the coffee stain brushes are there at the bottom.

Then just basically paint. Mess around with it until you have the right look.

Anyway, hopefully I'll have a more comprehensive lesson on this soon. In the meantime...here's the page I was just working on!

For this page, I used Armina Designs "Delicate Romance" from Gotta Pixel. The paper strip element actually comes from the kit "Classic" by Designs by Krista.

I LOVE this page! I kept catching my twins getting into stuff, always together, and I realized that TWO babies doing just about anything is cuter than just one baby.