The Mixer Brush tool

The Mixer Brush tool is new in Photoshop CS5.
With this tool we can paint our pictures in a fairly simple way from another picture.
And of course you can also use the tool directly to paint. I’m not a painter, so I will try to make use of a picture to make a painting.

We find the “Mixer Brush” tool under the “Brush” in the tool bar (1).
When this is selected, we find a number of options in the options bar (2).

Before I go any further with the options in the options bar, choose a brush.
For this I click the Brush panel button (1) in the options bar.
From the “Brush” panel, I choose one of the new brushes in Photoshop (2), and set the various options (3).
No matter what you do with this, we still have to suffer with this.
When we are ready, we close the “Brushes” panel by clicking the x icon in the upper right (4) of the window.

Before we start painting, we add a layer (1), and select the checkbox “Sample all layers” (2). This takes the colors from the background layer.

Then we choose a color to paint.
For this, select the eyedropper, and click anywhere in the portion on the color you want to set.
New in CS5 is that there appears a circle with different colors. The lower half of the circle, the old color again, the upper the new color.
I have not yet discovered the usefulness of this, but for some of us it will certainly be useful.

If you want to paint with multiple colors, hold the Alt key on your keyboard while you click on the different colors.
You will see that the box “Current load brush” has multiple colors.

Then click and drag in the image.

Note that when dealing with a different color, or with other colors to paint, you must first adjust the pipette.

Let me still talk about the options bar.
Far left, we have selected brush type. By clicking, we can change the brush presets.
The second button opens the “Brush” panel.
The third icon gives us the current brush load.
The next button will reload the brush after each stroke.
The next button will clean the brush after every brushstroke.

Clicking on the downward pointing arrow of the next field, we see a number of preset combinations for blending the different colors. All seem obvious to me.
With the four adjacent boxes, we can fill this blending mode manually.
When you choose a different blending mode from the list, you will also see that all these boxes will be filled automatically.

All of this is not only difficult, but needs a lot of patience and practice.
Van Gogh painting can not be finished in five minutes.

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