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Tutorial: Nebula-Brushes
Published: 2010-03-13 11:58:42 +0000 UTC; Views: 40781; Favourites: 1770; Downloads: 1023
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Description
I'm getting asked quite a lot how I do all my nebula work, so I decided it would be a good idea to share some of my knowledge in a tutorial.Now that my semester has finished and I'm done with all the exams I finally found time to do this. Turned out more comprehensive than I expected.
The brush I made for this tutorial can be found here: [link]
This is my contribution to the great community here at deviantArt.
If you have any suggestions, found any errors or just got any kind of feedback, please let me know.
I hope it'll be useful.
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Special thanks to !Kirill-Gorshkov for the english Photoshop screenshots and ^Elandria for the Daily Deviation.
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Note:
I've used Adobe Photoshop CS3 for this tutorial. It appears that the brush settings menu has undergone some minor changes in CS5. As far as I know, all the relevant options are still available, they just might have been moved to another sub-menu.
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Comments: 91
what? xD
your point sounds pointless.
Ov3RMinD used regual photoshop brushes to create the nebula brush.
the he showed us how you can use it.
you don't have to do everything the hard way. oΓ΄
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jeje I understand, but i prefer to create all by own because they look without artificial aspect. It's only my pointless. And sorry for my bad english, I am spanish.
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jeje I understand, but i prefer to create all by own because they look without artificial aspect. It's only my pointless. And sorry for my bad english, I am spanish.
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i see, maybe you explained it a bit unhappy xD
oh well, that's not true. most digital artists use many selfmade brushes. and these custombrushes can be everything, like fog, cristals, trees, grass, everything you can imagine!
and you know what?
the pictures look really realistic. almost like photographs.
Look up for Feng Zhu. He uses many brushes and also the regular ones. (the most time he uses the chalk brush that is a photoshop standart brush)
He has video tutorials on youtube, you may take a look at his paintings. it is really awesome!
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Congratulations on your excellent tutorial! It seems so difficult achieving a random image and you've explained it perfectly. I love trying to create textures and I think this could work well making papers and other backgrounds as well! Thanks so much for sharing!
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Thank you very much for posting this. Always nice to see how someone else makes there nebulae.
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Do you use a tablet to do this? I currently don't have one but am getting one soon and find it hard to make anything other then star fields, suns and planets.
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Yes, I use a tablet. I don't think it's possible without one. I would wait for my tablet to try this tutorial if I were you. It is just so much easier.
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This is beautiful and very informative! I have a question or two.. what size range is your brush tip and do you use pressure sensitivity when creating the brushes? My brushwork turns out blotchy and grainy, not smooth and sweeping like yours - I can't seem to match even your results of step 2 + 3 in Part 1 lol. I feel like I'm missing something, any advice would be appreciated, thank you so much!
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Size range is basically anything between 1 and 300. Usually I start with a larger brush to paint basic shapes and then add more and more detail with smaller brushes. The smudge tool is also very helpful to get rid of visible brush strokes. Pressure depends on what you're doing. You can use low pressure to paint particularly smooth spots and high pressure to paint more solid/bright areas. But it's not really important.
And you shouldn't really have any problems with the brushwork if you simply use the default soft round brush of Photoshop. If you use the default brush set, the soft brushes are those from 7th to 18th. Hope that helps.
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This is great! Definitely trying to figure out how to do this in GIMP.
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That's one of the best nebula tutorials I've ever seen, amazing
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Hey man just to let you know that I credited your nebula tutorial in a space art tutorial I made for a French magazine. I did not use your brush or image above but just explained a bit the process you nicely described here and made it myself for the purpose of my piece. Thus your name and URL is quote. I hope you're ok with that, it should bring some visitors to you then.
Cheers!
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An answer to a question I've oft asked...
Fav'd for future reference.
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Good work my friend, you took my tutorial to the next level!
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Honestly, this is the best nebula creation tutorial I've seen thus far. Great work!
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Thanks, glad you like it.
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That's a pretty good tutorial for making nebulaes.
But your probably made it with a tablet.
I only have my laptop's touchpad, so it's really hard to do those lol
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This tutorial covers a part of nebula creation I've never seen, but very much anticipated, before! I regard your painted nebulae to be some of the best there is here on dA, and now I know your deepest and darkest secrets regarding how to create them - beware!
On a more serious not though, this is a really great and very anticipated tutorial, thanks a lot man!
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Well it's not that much of a secret. I'm the only person using custom brushes. I still hope that some people can learn from it.
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werd ich mir auch mal zu gemΓΌte fΓΌhren
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Wow, that's indeed great resource! Thank you very much
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danke, werd mir das dann mal fuers naechste bild genauer ansehen
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The best part about painting your own brushes is that you can still essentially say you painte dthe whole peice. I made heaps of nebulae brushes back in late 2006, and it took forever since I wanted over a dozen unique variations to tackle that same problem you mentioned - seeing the same forms repeated over again 
Of course, many of your older nebulae with more unusual and volumetric forms I bet required a greater amount of flat-out digital painting, significant features should always be painted just for that one instance to make it unique and details can be added with the brushes later
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The Photoshop defaults are pretty useless. I guess you should use even higher resolutions than 1000x1000 but that's a lot of work if you want to make it very detailed.
And yes, the combination of traditional painting and good custom brushes is what makes it good. As I stated in the tutorial, the brushes can be very useful but wont do it alone.
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