Photoshop ® / PSP : Easter Egg Brushes

Easter Egg Brushes for Photoshop and Elements and PaintShop Pro and others

Thumbnail gallery of Easter Egg brushes (Set 132)

Thumbnail gallery of Easter Egg brushes (Set 69)

Thumbnail gallery of Easter Egg brushes (Set 67)

Additional examples of easter egg brushes

Easter egg brushes examples from pack 69

examples from Easter egg brushes pack 67

examples of easter egg brushes from pack 132

How can I change the Easter Egg Photoshop brush size?

Select the brush tool and then go to the brush palette and set the size option. In earlier versions of Photoshop (such as 6) there is no size option so one way around this is to select a scrap book brush design, paint an easter egg brush dab in a suitably sized document and then re-size the document and then re-select the entire brush (Easter egg or otherwise) and save as a new brush with the required size.

If you have an art pad / pen you can always re-size the brush stroke by using art pad pressure. The brush sizes vary from 10 x 10 to 2000 x 2000 etc depending on the source of the brushes

Loading Easter egg brushes into Photoshop

The Easter egg brushes are not loaded into Photoshop via an automatic process (wouldn't that be a nifty feature in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements), instead you have to load them via the brushes palette and the load / replace commands. You can find the load / replace command via the menu on the right side of Photoshop- you will see other options such as reset brushes, etc but the key ones are the load brushes and save brushes. Select the load brushes command and then browse for the brushes folder. By default, it will use the same location as last used for the brushes and that might or might not be the location you need. I leave my brushes in a brushes folder structure based on my various current projects but you may wish to have all the Easter egg brushes etc in a folder marked 'Easter eggs'. If you select the load function, all the current brushes remain and the Easter egg brushes will be added to the bottom of the palette. You may eventually reach a limit and Photoshop will refuse to load any more. This limits varies from setup to setup.

Another option to load the brushes is the replace command and this will remove all the existing brushes and replaces them with the Easter egg brushes. If you wish to restore the core brushes then either select them from the brushes list or use the reset brushes command.

Brush modes for the Easter Egg brushes

The Easter egg brushes can be applied as is to the background but they can also be blended with the background by using the blending modes, Set the mode via the option bar (once you have selected the brush tool) You have the option to the mode to multiply and darken etc as well as screen, dissolve etc. The end result depends on the color of the brush, the background and the mode.

The above example a brush with 50% gray, perhaps one of the more useful colors - in this example the brush is applied in multiply as well as lighten and screen. In the example, you can see that the multiply and the screen modes are still blue. They are probably the key modes for the brushes but all the other modes have their uses. The exact calculation for the multiply involves multiplying the channel and the underlying and then dividing by 255 which results in a darker image. the calculation for screen is a little more complicated. Anyway, the results can be seen.

The above example shows the multiply mode this time applied to the same image. The easter egg brush is applied four times with 50% gray to the blue background in multiply mode; the next, three times; the next, twice; and the last image on the right, the multiply mode brush has been applied only once. In this case, you can see the darkening of the brush strokes in multiply mode

The above example shows the screen mode and four times the first brush, three times etc

Color and brush strokes and Easter Eggs

One trouble with the brushes in Photoshop is the lack of color, there is no equivalent of the picture tube or the nozzle (Corel Painter). The only way to get around this is to use a layer and re-position the design multiply times, perhaps by using a script or action. Another useful feature perhaps in the creation of nozzle like brush stroke in Photoshop, is the shift ctrl L command to duplicate a layer (the layer containing the easter egg design). The shift ctrl L would be perfect except for that the dialog is not silent and always appears and asks for a layer name.

There are alternatives to adding color into brush strokes and that is to do the brush strokes in another application such as Illustrator (if that is at hand) or use a plugin tool such as Splat! from Alien Skin (sadly a product long out of production but still sorely missed). There have been other plugins and tools and of course, you can use PaintShop Pro and copy and paste the Easter egg designs back into Photoshop (but that would be too easy)

The nozzle or paint feature is one feature I would love to see added to Photoshop, perhaps Photoshop Elements as it is probably more a non-essential feature than an essential one for Photoshop users.

Free easter egg brushes sampler / demo

Follow us on Twitter

Follow graphicxtras on google+

Follow graphicxtras on facebook

Date modified: April 30th, 2012

Creating plugins and presets since 1995. Privacy - no details sent to third parties. After buying the Easter egg brushes pack, you receive the download link to a zip file containing the easter egg brushes in ABR and PNG formats - the set also includes documentation and a gallery of the easter egg brushes . Unique items, commercial use, royalty-free.