Visceraman1 - Joshua Lopez

I first had to find a good shot of myself. (Insert vanity joke here Sweet Jeri). (On a side note, this photo was taken by Jeri, and therefore belongs to her, and her alone...hopefully she doesn't mind too much. It's either that or I turn her into a wookie!). Here's a shot of me in Italy, showing now hair, save for a very, very closely cropped goatee:

Then, cracking open my trusty Photoshop CS (legal copy), I set about my work. The first item up would be to create a brush stroke to use for my hair creation. I opened a new document, I only need a small one, and no background colour. So, I began with a 64px by 64px w/ transparent background.

So, next I have to create some brush strokes to use. I need something coarse for the beard area, and something different for the hair line. I'll focus on just the beard area for now. (At this point, I have no idea what hair style I want, which means I also don't know the best way to create such a thing). I'm going to start by just adding some stubble, and begin building the beard from there. Should we go with a full beard?

Now, you've got your small document open...(by the way, this step will involve a considerable amount of trial and error to get it right....at least it did for me). Make a new, and temporary white layer below your transparent one, and then zoom in on your document. I tried a few different percentages, but found 300% worked the best. Select a medium gray color, and a small round brush. I tried several different sizes, and found that the 3px brush gave good results, though I did increase to 4px for one of my stubbles. This is another one of those things you'll want to play around with.

Lower your opacity to about 50% and make a few marks on your document.






Hide your temporary background, and select Edit > Define Brush Pattern:

A dialog box will pop up, and you can name this whatever the hell you want to..you're going to rename it anyway.
And now the fun begins!

I have no idea how your workspace is set up, I usally have brushes docked, but you may not. If not, just go to Window > Brushes, and your brush preset window will appear. This is where we have to really define the brush behaviour, and again, this part took me quite a few tries to get exactly what I wanted.

In the brush preset window, click on the Shape Dynamics section. The only thing we're concerned with here is the angle our brush stroke will be. Since beards, or any hair, doesn't grow in perfect lines, (save for dolls, or lame implants), we want our stroke to have that same random quality. In the middle, for Angle Jitters, raise the amount to a high percentage. You can go 100% or so.




Next turn on Scattering. This spreads your brush out a bit, adding to the uneven random stroke. At this point, also make sure your smoothing option is on and you're just about done.

The last thing to do, is to save your new brush. Click the flyout arrow and select New Brush Preset. I called mine Stubble Brush, but what difference does that make.

Now, we're going to start adding stubble to our picture. If you don't like the results you're getting, just make a new brush. HA! This is where I really found myself going back to the drawing board over and over again. This part is the easy part, mainly because you can be as sloppy as you want, no need to stay within the lines at all. Bring up the photo you're adding hair to.

Make a duplicate layer of the original, and zoom in on the picture. My picture was fairly large to begin, I zoomed in to 300%, and would increase to 400% periodically. Play with, and alter the size of your brush also. 1px, 3px, and 5px were the best to work with, and you're going to go out of the lines - don't fuss about that. In fact, if your neck is visible like mine is, that's all the better.

Zoom out periodically and check your progress. As you can see, I have a pretty even stubble line, that extends up to where my hair should be.

My beard color is odd. I have different shades of brown and red in there, so the next thing I did was to take a colour sample from my original photo, and add a second layer of stubble. This isn't overly noticeable in the photo, but more accurate. It also thickens things up a bit.

My intent is to create a full beard. I could stop here, or even sooner if all I wanted was a light stubble, or 5 0'Clock shadow.

So, it's back to creating a new brush stroke before we can continue. This will use the same principle as the stubble brush but since I want it to be more beard like, may take a bit longer. In order to begin, we have to take note of what beard hair looks like. I've plucked a few from different parts of my goatee as a reference point, and see that I have straight, thin, coarse, curly, and short hairs. So, my in order for my fake beard to blend properly and appear somewhat natural, my brush stroke will have to contain these different aspects as well. And now I bring up the file I used to create my stubble brush, and add a new layer.

I'll start with the same premise, a small 3px round brush, and I'm going to create different size lines, curves etc., fairly close together....not quite pubic hair like, but not that different either.

The brush stroke I finally settled on is this:

After clicking Edit>Define Brush Pattern, and again opened up the brush window and made a few alterations to the brush. The stroke needs to be somewhat random still, but not as random as the stubble. Under Shape Dynamics, raise the Angle Jitter to anywhere from 15-45%. Stop when you see what you like in preview panel. Click on Scattering and lower it to 2.

Once this part of the beard brush is defined, save it as a new brush pattern, and away we go. We're going to adjust the scattering dynamics of the brush as we go along, to thicken and thin the beard. Bring up your photo again, and add a new layer, and zoom in to about 400%.

Select black as your foreground colour again, and start brushing in some hair. It doesn't mattter where the hair falls (don't get it too far off the fact), because we can erase...er trim this later. How much hair to add depends on the look you want. Mountain Man? Biker? Hippy? Whatever. Again, play with the size of you brush. Mine defaults to about 29px, but I only use 3-15px. (You can set the default in your brush preset window). Don't focus on only adding black, unless your beard is jet black. Add varying colours, and sample the colours found naturally. If you don't have anything to sample from, find a photo of a real beard, or use a wide variety of colours.

See, I've got it on my neck, in my ears etc. This will come off later. It's still a bit thin around the chin, so I'm going to thicken that up, and hide my chin a bit more.

And now, I'm ready for a bit of a shave. You can use any brush shape to erase, or create a new brush. Completely up to you. I'm only going to focus on cleaning up my cheeks, my lips, just under my lower lip, and make sure there's no hair on my ears. (My wife plucks those).

And I'm done, well almost. I'm leaving it like this, because it's not perfect. No beard is, unless you get it trimmed at the barber shop, or are pretty damn anal about it.

I'm going to stop here for now. I'll continue with my little tale later, when I add a cute little bob to my head.