Inspired by Chris Spooner’s Sticky Tape brush set, I decided to have a go at creating my own set. I wanted to use electrical insulation tape a bit the like the effect you may have seen in the E4 tv channel branding.

I stopped by Clarkes Stationers and Ransoms hardware store and bought a nice big piece of white card and some green electrical insulation tape and then set about tearing up some strips and roughly sticking it to the card.

I then fixed a macro lens to my Nikon D70s and took close up shots of each bit of tape that I’d stuck on the card.

Before starting on the brushes I sharpened up the images and adjusted the contrast and exposure to make the lighting a bit harder so that you could see the details and creasing a bit more. I didn’t reduce the size of the image as I wanted higher resolution brushes.

Using the pen tool I created a path around each bit of tape. Take your time with this bit and (if you haven’t used the pen tool before) get a feel for how that tool works. Try and keep to no more than a pixel inside the object you are drawing around (the bit of tape).

Once the path was complete I created a selection from the path, copied the contents and pasted onto a new layer. By doing this you make the background transparent which is important for creating brushes.

Hide the original layer for now but make sure you’ve pasted the contents of your selection into the same position as your original layer. By doing this it will help if you want manually add some shadows (which is what I did) to the tape.

At this point I cropped out the extra space from around the tape.

I made a selection of the entire canvas on the correct layer and then chose ‘Edit’ and ‘Define Brush Preset’. The dialogue window gives you the option to name that brush so I gave it an obvious name followed by a number (there are 4 or 5 of these!).

I did the same steps above for another few bits of tape and, from the Brushes palette I saved the entire set out as a .abr file.

Download .abr file here.

Pretty good fun. Wondering what to try next?

Tags: brushes, Photoshop, tape, tutorial

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under How I make . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.