How To Create Realistic Digital Artwork Inspired By 3D Textile Arts with NEW Fiber Effect Brushes: Photoshop Tutorial

Thanks to my new brushes for Photoshop (there is also a Procreate version), you can now easily create digital art that is inspired by 3d textile arts such as tufting, punch needle embroidery, needle felting, crochet, & woven fibers!

In this tutorial, I go over how to use my brushes in Photoshop. I show you how to load the brushes, which use my special mixer brush technique. I also show you how to use the specialized palette Photoshop file and other tips and tricks to create realistic fiber effect digital artwork in Photoshop. 

Download the Fiber Brush Studio →

Download a Free Brush Sampler →

If you are not a native English speaker, I have put the video transcript below, which you can translate into your language! 

Hey friends, Jessica here with Creators Couture and I am so excited to be finally bringing you the tutorial for my new um fiber effect brushes. As you can see by these previews, they really combine a huge um a lot of different textile and fiber art influences to create these brushes. I was inspired by punch needle art, wool felting, tufting, um, crochet, macra. There were so many different things that inspired me to create these brushes and it just came together in a really cool way. And what I like about the brushes is that you can create kind of things that are not even possible in real life. So, it's really bringing together all these influences to create a new visual medium in Photoshop and create these um illustrations or these designs that have this really like textured um dimensional and even handmade look. So, it's really fun. The brushes make it really fast and easy. I have been working on them for at least a year, if not more. I've been and then really concentrating on them for the last months. And just I'm not even gonna tell you how much work it was. But here we are getting to the brushes, the previews, and you can see I have a few different collections which I'll go over. And because I'm always going over the top, I not only have the brushes, but I used the brush effects and to create these texture layer styles for you so that you could also have this other way to create with these textures that I've created. It's not just like um some texture that is from a photo layered on. So, it was a lot of work, but there's a lot of fun to be had. So, first off, I'm just going to give you a little break through breakdown of what's in the um folder here. So, you'll either get a commercial or personal license and the but they'll have the same product in it. So, it's just depends on if you want to use them just for yourself. So, first off, I have a folder called brush charts. Obviously, I've got all the brushes all together for you numbered and the style chart so that you can have those to refer to at any time. We've got all the preview images that I just showed you. And then we've got the files for Photoshop and files for Procreate. So, in this video, I'm just doing Photoshop. So, in here, we'll have a link to this product tutorial. Then, we have the brushes, the brushes, um, main, the main brushes, and then I also have them as a single one color brush. So, m brushes main and plain. We've got our palettes here. We have a PSD starter file. It's just a little blank document, but just that you could open and kind of use as a template if you want. I have my favorite background in there, and it's a good size for working with these brushes. And then the layer styles. So, let's get into um loading these. So, for brushes, you always have three ways that you can load them. You can doubleclick on them, although I don't recommend that. I always say um the best way to load your brushes is to open your brush panel, go to the top right, and click import brushes. And then you can just navigate to where the brushes are. Let's go here, Photoshop brushes, and then load them. So, I've already loaded them, so I don't need to reload them. You can also double click them, but in fact sometimes if you double click them, it might open another program because I actually downloaded Affinity. And so now it's that's my default program right now for brushes. Um, and then you could also take them and drag them onto the Photoshop icon. And then we have the palettes. You can just open those. And then what else? The styles. Same thing as the brushes. You can um load them the same way, double click, but my computer never associates ASL with Photoshop, so it will give me an error message. You can also drag them onto the icon or you can go to styles, click on the top right, and click import styles and then navigate to them. I have three different styles. Um, I load them all, but I put them as different files just in case you didn't want to load all of them together. And we've got the textures, the fabrics, and then the depth and recolor style. So, that gets us started with loading up what we need. And then now we're going to go get into using the brushes, which is very fun and easy. Okay, so now we've got everything loaded up. So, let's get to creating. I've opened my full-size palette. This is the one that I use most of the time, and it's going to look really familiar if you're used to working with my embroidery brushes. And it actually only has one palette for like one main palette for these um brushes, which is actually easier than my embroidery brushes. I mean, it's just a little bit more simple, I would say. So, the embroidery had a lot of different ones you could play with, which is good, but for this, all you need is one palette. So, it makes it more simple. And I usually use this. I have the palette default. That's the layer that I sample off of all the time. I also put it as a horizontal um because these are vertical, but I actually almost never use that. But just in case you get a brush stroke that's coming out and it looks a little bit funny, you could also sample from the alternate palette. And then I've opened up my template file. It is about 3500 by 3500. With these brushes, I created the default at a very like a good size because I wanted them to be um you know, big enough for things that you're going to print, what have you. So, I recommend just working in a larger size with these, something like at least uh 3,500 pixels by 3,500 pixels or more. you know, it doesn't take that much more space and memory, but um and you can always downsize it. So, you can work smaller. It's just with the size of the palettes, with the size of the brushes, the workflow is going to be even more smoother if you work in a larger size. And um I always use like a fabric background that always makes it a bit nicer looking. And here I've just kind of got a white one. And if you've also worked with the embroidery, you will recognize the fabric layer styles. So, I have my favorite one, which is four here. I could change the color of this and the layer style is already applied to it. Um, it will make it, you know, different layer style, which we'll get into the layer styles um again. But these are the fabric layer styles that I loaded up. And I've just got a white fill layer. And I've clicked on, you know, the layer style, fabric number four. and it just puts this overlay of um a texture that I put on it. But you can flip through and do different ones. And if it's too small, the size of it even you can um increase it. But I'm just going to stick with this one. And also on this tutorial, if you have any questions, let me know down below in the comments. Um because these are similar to my embroidery brushes. if I skip over something or um there's something that's not clear, just let me know and I can do follow-up videos and all of that. So, I've got my fabric background. Um I have my brush charts. So, I've got a few different collections. I have the wide brush collection here and then I have a medium one. And the wide ones are just, you know, kind of dispersed wide. They're kind of for filling in bigger areas. Um and then we have the details collection. Every brush has a main brush and an accent brush that you can that has a lighter look to it. It's not as dense and they're all they're all pressure sensitive, which is really great. And then here I have my my fiber painting brushes. I've got the wide collection. So, we'll just open these up. I'm going to actually do that in reverse now. And I also show you I have some accent brushes, some fabric accent which can add some really cool um uh textures to your designs. And then the details collection, the medium collection, the wide collection. And every brush has a main one. So this is wide one and then wide one accent. Wide two, wide two accent. So, like all of my mixer brushes, um I will put the mixer brush uh foundation tutorial down below in case you're not used to working with mixer brushes. But these brushes are um like I said, using the mixer brush in Photoshop and they are loading up um multiple colors to create these effects. And um by default, this is really important because I always get questions about this. By default, I've preloaded them for you. So, you can just take this brush and draw like this and instantly see what the brush is going to look like. However, if you want to change the size of that, that color is going to drop out and load up whatever you've sampled last. And in this case, I haven't sampled anything. So, it's going to be empty. And if you draw again, nothing's going to come out. So, that's the whole reason why I have the um palette for you to load up into the brushes. But the brush um that's preloaded is just a preview. It makes it faster and more fun so that you can get an idea of what the brush is going to look like. And this is the the accent brush to the first one. So, as you can see, if I'm just taking this brush and um just to give it a little bit more realism, I'm going to use my default uh layer style, which adds just a little bit of drop shadow onto this um onto this layer. If I just take this brush and draw it out like this, it has pressure sensitivity. So, if you use a lighter pressure, it's going to have a softer look to it. and lighter. And then if you use a harder pressure, it's going to be stronger. Same with the accent brush. The accent brush is like it's like it sounds just really an accent brush, but it's got a lighter texture. If you, you know, um it's going to have more transparency. And then if you push down hard, it's going to be like stronger. So, same thing there. And I'm just going to show you some of the brushes. and they all have really cool different effects. This is the accent brush. Um, and yeah, these brushes I have been having so much fun with. I've been just trying to push them out the door, going really crazy because there's so many things to do. And here we are. So, I'm just excited. Anyway, so these are the brushes. Um, and So, using the brushes, I explained to you that they're already preloaded, but say I want to take this brush number one here. And obviously, not everybody's going to want this brush in pink. So, we need to load it up with our color. And I'm going to go over here. I'm going to take that brush. I am going to And I've really optimized all these brushes for this ratio of the palette. So, you could use this brush, um, this is really important. You can use this brush at a much smaller size, say, if you're working on a really smaller format, but I recommend to first load your brush in its original size because it's the right size for the texture palette. And then shrink the brush size down because if you shrink the brush size down and select it, you can get a really different effect. So, we're going to take our brush W1. And then we're going to go over here and say we want a blue. So, I am going to option and click in the center of that square. And that loads the blue up into my palette and into the brush. And then I can go and it will be blue. And now that I've loaded that blue, actually one good thing to know is that if I take this brush and say I hit my left bracket or I change the size, that blue is going to be loaded into the brush that I just um into this brush now. So that can be a little hack to save you time if say, oh, I don't want to like load that brush again, but I want to change my brush. just left bracket and then right bracket if you want if you don't even want to change the size and it's going to um load that up into the brush. So I'm just going to left right bracket and now it will load it into this brush. So here's this cool brush. This one has got a really like smooth effect but I want it in blue. So I'm going to left bracket right bracket. I'm on a Mac. I think it's probably the same shortcut. Or you could even just go select your brush, change the size a little bit. It's going to put that blue in there and then you have it. That's another um really cool kind of a smooth one. And I love every brush has an accent so you can have it in a lighter version. And say you want to have like something going. Here's um let's see here. Let's get off of the white and get to like some medium for changing. Um let's see. So many different brushes.

Okay. So here's the brush medium 11. But I want to like add a little a couple little things to kind of break up the side. And the accent brushes are just really good for that. Or say I just made that stroke in yellow, but I'll add a new layer, add my recolor darker, and get like an orange and then have some little accents coming off the side. So, that is how to load the brushes and changing the size. So, I think I've covered all that. As you can see, I very much pre-programmed these these tutorials. Thankfully, I'm like I'm a slight type B personality or I'd never get anything done. So, um they I'm not obviously not worried about everything being perfect. And so we've got the brushes. Now we're going to get into the um the layer styles that I provide for you um to add that little bit of drop shadow and depth. So let's just This is a detailed brush. Let me see a brush. Oh, wait. That's the one that I just did. I don't want to do that one. Oh, this is quite quite a unique brush. I like that brush, too. Okay, this is medium brush 2 in a beautiful pink also. Love how it looks. Um, and now let's see here. Let me just clear this layer style. So, this is how the brush would look on just by itself. But I add this layer style which is the recolor darker lighter. That is the one that I put on almost every um layer that I do with using this technique. And it's really nice. I've saved you a lot of time. What this does is it adds a little bit of a drop shadow, but also it makes it really easy to change the color if you need to or change the lightness or darkness. So, we've got the drop shadow on, but I have three color overlays here. and the color overlay. The first one is to change the color. So, it's on a color blend mode. But, so if I click here, I could change it to like a blue. You're not going to see that because I I have by default put the opacity really far down. Well, to nothing. So, I could turn the opacity up to like 100. And then now I could change it to whatever color I want and I don't have to like reample or redraw that brush. So, this adds incredible flexibility for um your artwork and saving you time so that you don't have to redo brush strokes if you want it in another color. Another thing that you can do is have it be lighter or darker. So, the first layer above that is a color overlay and it's set, it's white set to soft light, and it's all the way down to zero. But this layer is for if you want to lighten it. Lighten it. And you can just move that slider and lighten it if you like. So I'm going to turn that off because I don't want to lighten it right now. Then the last layer is if you want to darken it. And it's got black on soft light. So you can scroll that up and make it darker and more intense if you want to. So I'll click okay. And this universal layer style that I put on all my layers just makes it so much easier for me to change the color, change the lightness and darkness, and it's already on there. And what's great is that it's already on there, but everything's set to zero. So, you just use what you need, and it makes it super fast and easy for you to do that. So, I'm really happy with that layer style. And obviously you can play around with a drop shadow if you're working. If that drop shadow drop shadow is um a little bit like not big enough for you, you could always increase the size, increase the spread um increase the intensity and make it, you know, stand out. I'm going to hit cancel. And yes, so that is the universal um recoloring layer style. One thing also I want to show you guys is I'm just trying to get over all the basics. Also, the accents are really nice. Um I love to use some of these accent brushes. um at the end like especially this 24. I love adding those touches of loose threads. Those are really great for adding the last bits of texture at the end of your design. And again, I can put my layer style on it and then that way it has that um little bit of drop shadow and makes it look really nice. And then the other thing that I wanted to show you guys is my fabric accent brushes. And for these, I was inspired by some kind of like fabric and um textile art that I saw and they had kind of little pieces of cutout fabrics and I was like, how could I um you know imitate that or do something similar to that? So, for these ones, these are all the fabric accent brushes. And if I go like this, you're going to it it paints out um a little bit of fabric um kind of like a mesh or different, you know, different textures. And now, like we're going to zoom in here and I'm going to show you a little bit better what we're talking about. But, okay. So, I'll paint this brush. And it doesn't look like much on its own, but I'm going to put that fabric depth recolor layer style on it. And then now you can see that brush. And I used a white. I could have used like a color, but it gives it a little bit of depth. Um, this this layer style has pretty much the same as that other layer style on it, but it has um a little also a little bit of bevel and emboss which adds quite a cool look to it. And in fact, I might just take make this like a lighter blue just so you could see it a little bit better. So this is but I do like using like kind of a white like a really I think it looks really best on like a light color but adding this like you cut off some thin fabric and it's got the same thing the same color overlays. So you could change the color if you want. You can make it lighter. You can make it darker. And you could adjust the uh drop shadow and everything as you like. But, um, you're going to see this some of this, uh, what do you call it? This fabric accents on some of my, uh, sample images. And I just love how this looks. And it's got a little bit of like that edge to it as well. So, it can really look like cut um, depending on how you uh, you know, kind of paint it. and it's got the little scallops where it looks like thicker. So, I just had a really fun time with that and I thought it added so much. And so, yeah, I'm just I'm I'm really happy with how that those brushes turned out. And let's see here. Let me make a new layer underneath this. I also have some small um shadow brushes. And these are just um I've got like some basic ones here. You can use if you need to add some bits of like a little additional shadow. And these are the ones that are not loaded. Nothing pre-programmed, but you know, and you can just like do something like this. You wanted to add a little bit more depth and then change, you know, you could change the opacity of the layer. You could change it to multiply, what have you. Um or I did already preload some of these um with like this one has a 50% opacity. So you can just um use it like that. And it already has the opacity built in. It has a big shadow 50% opacity. I also have one with a linear burn at a low opacity and then a linear burn like this. So you can add some shadows to your artwork. Just remember that when you use these, for some reason, if you go to you paint another um regular brush, you're going to have it doesn't change back the opacity by default. So, you need to keep an eye on that and put the opacity back up if you use one of these brushes or even like the blend mode. Like on this one, it has a linear blur linear burn blend mode. So if you go back to say another one, another brush, it's still going to have that linear burn blend mode on there. So make sure that you reset these at the top for some reason. It doesn't do that automatically. It's going to your regular brush is going to keep whatever was the last settings that you had on there. So that is the brushes and I think I went through all of them and sampling. So that's quite good. Now I am going to show you something else. Uh let's go into my styles demo. So I created this um little motif to go with um my freebie brushes. And I'm actually going to turn just just so you can see here. I made everything one color. So, an important thing to know with these brushes is that I not only give you the loaded brushes that are already loaded with the mixer brush setting set. I gave you them as plain old regular regular brushes. Obviously, they're not going to like look super cool if you just take a regular old brush. Let me just I've got a regular brush here and I'll just show you how they look. So, let's just move down here. This is how that brush looks. But this can come in handy later if you're wanting to use my styles. And the styles is like a way to just give you much more creative freedom in how you apply these kind of styles. And you could even maybe apply them to some of your old art as well or create new art with um what do you call it? Uh rather than using the mixer brushes if you wanted this gives you a different way to kind of create these kind of effects. And how you could do that is just putting a regular old one color brush like this. Actually I have one saved here. So, this is just a regular old one color brush. And I can go to my styles here, my texture styles, which were very carefully and methodically made by me, and I can click on them, and then I can have all these different sort of texture effects. So, if you look over here, you're going to see all these different sort of fiber styles and effects. And they are even um you can uh adjust them for your you know what you want. So let's just click on one of them here. And basically they are a special texture that I made and it's a pattern overlay with the linear light. And then the opacity, I set them to a good general opacity, but if you have a lighter color, you might want to take the opacity down or you can move it up. So anyway, I'm really excited about these because I think that they can even help you with your old art, adding textures. So it's not just only kind of new builds, but it's like ways to add textures to um other things or different kind of, you know, artwork. So, I think it could be really fun and I just think it's a huge just uh value just to be able to click and add click on a layer and add texture to it. So, let's just zoom out here and okay. So, let's turn back on all these. So, basically I put all these as a solid color so I could show you adding some texture here. So, if I click on this now, one thing that I recommend is that um I if I add texture onto this layer here, it's got some like lights and darks and different colors and grays in there. So, it might not look as nice actually as just doing texture on a solid color. So, I can just flip through. I've got this yellow layer selected, one color, and then I just click like this and I can see all these different textures to add. And even you can like layer things, but it really just gives you um a different way to create. And now some of these if it's on like a really light color, you might want to go into the pattern overlay and take that opacity down a little bit so it doesn't look it might be a little bit intense. But I'll click okay. And let's just flip through. So I have all these crazy different textures. So that's 35. That looks cool. I'll This one's texture 11. That looks fine. But you see how it's it can look even quite cool in its own own right. Um using these textures. The only difference is with the texture, obviously, you're not going to have that like directional control of the stroke, but it's still super cool. And this is just going to give you like so much um you know, you can use these on all different things. So, that's quite fun. So, I'm just going to flip through and grab some textures here. And if it's a little bit dark, I'll go into the pattern overlay and maybe turn that down a little bit. So, for these these lines, because they're so thin, I'm going to take the opacity down a little bit. We just want that little bit of fiber. And same thing with the yellow. That one's not too bad. Or even seven. But it's too dark. So, I'm going to click on the pattern overlay, take the opacity down. And now we can see we had this one color design. Um, and now it's super full of texture and looks quite cool. And this is a way that you can even transform your older art. The only caveat that I would say is if it has really if you have something that has like a very sharp line like say you have something like this and let's just put a green here and then you add some texture. It's not going to look so great if it's really got that sharp line. You really want something that has a little bit of a softer edges, but this can be really great for like painting with like maybe a light stroke and adding some texture to some of your artwork. Um, so I just think it's super cool and I'm just so glad that I made them and I think that there's a lot more to be explored with those texture layer styles as well as just the brushes. So, yeah, we've got the texture layer styles, and also all the texture layer styles also have that little built-in drop shadow. So, you've got that covered. And there's 69 of them. And I um basically what I did was I took my brushes and kind of filled because every brush has a different, you know, pattern inside of it uh that comes out. And then I just chose the best ones and I had like a hundred brushes, but I ended up with about 70 styles because it's like you didn't want ones that are exactly too similar. So, it was a lot of editing to create these like really cool styles. And let me go through and just double check if there's anything. I love this like um super type B tutorial here. uh starter file, styles, palettes. Oh, one last thing. Let's see our brushes. Um is I have also, if you're familiar with the embroidery, I do have the metallic palettes. So, let's see here. I'm going to grab wide brush, too. I'm going to option click. These are all like metallics. I've got gold, desaturated gold. You can just click on any layer and load that layer into your brush by option clicking or alt if it's a PC perhaps. Oh wait, let me I'm on the plain brushes that's why. Let's go to um let's see our number one option click. Let's load some gold up in there. And you might have to play around with it, but this is something for you to a bonus that you can play around with. Um, let's make a new layer. And you can have some like quite cool gold sort of effects. Let's add the depth thing here. So, yeah, that's fun. Let's So, you can get those really fun gold accents.

And where's my little I want to try to find the really direction. This one should look kind of cool. So, yeah. So, you can add some cool metallic gold. And then one last thing that I have is I have this metallic palette that I've used in a lot of different products and things. And this can be interesting if you want to add like a really let's say um stronger gold, not like a soft. If you option here, option click. I'm using a detailed brush and you can get some like really shiny sort of gold effects and play around with that. Um,

and get, you know, get some of these fibers here in a really metallic gold sort of format. Um, but I prefer I would say that's just a bonus. I don't use that one that much yet. I haven't found a use for that, but I would use if I'm doing metallic this metallic palette here. And you don't need to even like hi um turn the layers on or off. If you want to say get a warm silver and let's grab like a different brush here. I can option click and it loaded up the warm silver because I had that warm silver layer selected. And then we're going to get those silver brush strokes. zoom out a little bit. So, that is the metallic bonus. Although sometimes some of these come out with a metallic sort of look. Anyway, um so I think that is everything. If I think of anything else, I'll put it down in the comments. And just um I'm really excited to push this out and get this going. I've just been working on this way too long. It's making me crazy. and let me know if you have questions. I can even do some video replies if I have things that were not clear. And if you're familiar with the embroidery brushes, you will be familiar with um this technique and everything. So, thank you so much for getting the brushes. Have lots of fun. We're going to have a lot of fun with them. I cannot wait to be doing tutorials with these instead of like all the TDM that comes with launching a pro product. I forgot how many things there are. And there are so many people that are doing this that are like teams and I'm just one person, but I think these are going to be amazingly fun brushes to play with and create with. So, and also um a couple different uh things that I would maybe tell you is that um you know, you really have to sometimes this is like you want to simplify things a bit sometimes and for it to look good. So, you know, you kind of have to think about your perspective and simplifying things and because if you made something and you everything is like this big and there's like a lot in your composition and if it's everything has to be so small, you're not going to see the details. So, you really have to think about how big you want to make things so that you can see these details. And so a lot of times with these brushes, I find that it can be kind of um doing something simple or close up where you're really where they're really going to shine and you know thinking about that. Um not my phone going off. Hold on one second. Okay. And one thing that um I would remind you is to like each layer put its own, you know, drop shadow layer on it. And that's where you're going to get kind of this buildup of depth and texture. Um each layer I recommend to have that drop shadow on, but follow along. Make sure you're subscribed to my channel. And we're going to be um uh doing tutorials to kind of show you how to do these and also to give yourself a little bit of grace because it's kind of like a brand new medium, you know, so it's going to be even though I'm making these brushes sometimes I was doing it at first and going like this looks like crap. It's not like how I wanted it. but it's really like almost like a new art medium and so it's like going to take a little time to think how to work with it and get the proportions right and um yeah so it's been really such a fun journey but I think it's now that I've got that done and I'm working on a lot of things um now it's getting easier for me and then also I'll be doing some of these uh my sample images and showing you how I made them and so you can check those out and kind of get the hang of it basically. But yeah, I think it's just going to be a lot of fun. Okay, so I'm going to wrap this up. It's been too long already. Thank you so much. Comments, questions down below. All right, I'll see you guys soon on a new tutorial as soon as I get everything out. Okay, bye.