1.

Take the standard CSP balloon pen and start drawing plant silhouettes.

Don't try to make them perfect, nature is not perfect either!

(You don't even have to look for reference if you don't feel like it ^^

I didn't either and some of my plants are totally invented D

 

Piece the plants together from smaller parts, e.g. draw the stems and then add leaves.

This is so much easier than drawing the whole thing in one go!

 

 

2.

You can either leave it as is, or take a pen and draw in some details on another layer:

Leave separations, spots, veins..

Again, don't be a fusspot and don't go for crazy detail! Nobody will see it later.

3.

First merge the balloon and the pen layer.

Then, if you want your brush to be able to change colors, make sure your color expression is set to gray!!! Otherwise it will stay black and white!

4.

Now take your lasso selection tool and cut & paste all your plants on a separate layer.

It's super practical if you have the selection mode on new selection, as it allows you to drag around your previous selection and recycle it for the next brush tip, if it’s big enough.

5.

The next step is to transform and rotate all the plants, so that they all stand vertically, so the brush won't paint them askew later.

If you see lines that are too thin or too thick, adjust them with the line correction tool.

6.

Now you're ready to register the brush tips!

There's an auto action tool for this ("Create Brush bulk (80)"), but you still have to choose a save location for each brush tip, so this will take a while.

If you somehow forgot to change the color expression to grey, there's another auto action that will change 80 of your layers to gray in one click.

(The auto actions are both free ^^)

 

 

To set up the "Create Brush bulk (80)" auto action, drag all your brush tips into a pile in the center of the canvas. check the size e.g. by cropping around the whole pile and then looking at the canvas size. The pile should be no bigger than W 300 mm, H 100 mm, otherwise it won't work. (The auto action can be manually and painstakingly changed for bigger brushes but it will run slower as a result so i don’t recommend it if it doesn’t have to be.)

Anyway…

Scale the plants if needed, then name all the layers. I recommend something unique like “.veg” followed by a number because you have to be able to find them fast later on.

Check for mistakes!!!

DON'T run the auto action before you're absolutely sure everything is set up right!!! You won't be able to escape the whole thing once you start it... (Yes, I would know, because I held [esc] until it went through all 79 layers of my project… twice… )

Then, drum roll, click on the topmost layer and start the auto action.

...and register eeeach and eeeeevery brush tip you drew...

Sorry, saving can’t be “auto-actioned”… but you'll survive ^^

7.

Almost there!

Throw the brush tips into a brush and experiment with the settings...

(What angle should the brush tips be? Will they flip horizontally?

Do you want color jitter? How about the size? The spraying effect? The pen pressure? Should the brush paint only one plant species or a whole meadow? ...)

Experiment until the settings fit your brush.

 

Keep in mind, that all the brush tips will paint the same size.

So if you have e.g. tall grasses that should stick out from the rest, or small herbs which you intended to be be smaller than the others, you have to make separate brushes for them!

You can download the brushes used in the first and last image for free here:

 

 

Have fun!

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