Creating the Survey's New Sun-Shadow Brushes Using Photoshop's Shape Dynamics Brush Setting

To learn about how the Survey's new sun-shadow brushes were designed in Photoshop, read the tutorial by clicking here!

Designed to provide continuity with their traditional Rapidograph ink art, the Survey's digital brushstrokes haven't seen any significant update since 2013. Nonetheless, minor corrections were applied to the basic set, mostly adding extra pixels to dotted lines and texture brushes, creating a more prominent appearance for strokes rendered by rapid repetitive brush movement.

Painted lines, surface modeling, damage, and plaster textures are now inked with 7-pixel brush-width. In contrast, damage texture is indicated by a custom bristle paintbrush produced for a faithful damage replication that has the same non-uniform appearance as our traditional ink-pen.

Further changes include a refined dashed line to better indicate architectural features and the complete overhaul of how brushes are saved, including their color, size, and tool settings. These improvements help the artist focus more on the actual drawing process, even when working digitally.

However, innovation can never stop as long as there can be a better, more comfortable way provided for the artist to facilitate digital inking! In this new tutorial of the Survey's "Tidbits…" series, digitalEPIGRAPHY would like to focus on one of the focal points in rendering raised and sunken relief, namely sun-shadow transitions.

Drawing aesthetically pleasing linewidth transitions applying a dynamically changing brush stroke can be quite difficult. However, with the alternated use of drawing freehand with Photoshop's brilliant Brushstroke Smoothing Tool and laying down paths with the Curvature Pen Tool, one can have the necessary "superpower" to reach near perfection...

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