Turn a Beetle into a Brush in Photoshop

By Dawn Pedersen · 03/14/2009 ·

Beetle Brush Preview

Photoshop is so flexible, it lets your artistic side go wild. In this tutorial, you’ll create a custom Photoshop brush using a photo of a beetle. You can adapt this method to make a custom brush out of any image. We’ll also work with Photoshop’s dynamic Brushes panel.

Your feedback is encouraged and much appreciated!

What You Should Know First

Source File

We’ll start with a photo of a beetle in my husband’s hands. We found the little guy in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains (click on it to view and download the full size version):

Click this Image to Download the Source File

You can use just about any image for this technique, but the easiest ones to work with will have a solid-tone object against a contrasting background.

Part One: Prepare the Beetle Image

Open the beetle photo in Photoshop.
Select the Crop tool from the Tools panel.
Click and drag a square around just the beetle.
Press Enter/Return on your keyboard to complete the crop.

Crop the Beetle

View the Layers panel (Window > Layer).
Copy the image to a new layer by pressing Ctrl+J (Cmd+J on Mac).

Copy to a New Layer

If the top layer is not highlighted in the Layers panel, select it by clicking on it.
Run the Threshold command: Image > Adjustments > Threshold.

The Threshold Command

Use the Threshold Level slider to set the level so that the beetle is mostly black and it is surrounded by mostly white. I found that I liked it at 72.
Click OK.

Threshold Level

That’s close to perfect, but there are some shadows to clean up under the left leg and rear end. Zoom in by selecting the Zoom tool in the Tools panel and clicking on the beetle’s back end a couple of times (if it’s zooming out, click on the icon with a plus sign in the Control Panel.)
Now select the Brush tool in the Tools panel .
In the Control panel, click on the drop down arrow to the right of the text Brush:.
In the drop down box, double-click on the size 19 hard-edged brush.

Hard Brush 19

Press D on your keyboard to set the Foreground/Background colors to the defaults of black/white.
Press X to swap the white and black. We want to paint with white.