Got an image I want to ‘spraypaint’ onto a background. So instead of the ‘spraygun’ just spraying a colour everywhere, I want it to ‘spray’ this image everywhere, higgledy piggledy.

Know what I mean?

Dave

clonestamp tool is your friend..

No..?

Me neither molgrips

clonestamp tool – I’ll have a look

Set the image you want to ‘spraypaint’ as an additional layer over your background, mask it off so all you can now see is the original background then use whatever brush effect you want to remove the mask and your top layer will appear in that effect.

This is how I would do it in PSE9, not sure about other versions.

ETA; ah, didn’t read the bit about being random, custom brush is probably the best way to go as mentioned below.

Create a custom brush, then you can ‘spray’ it all over’t shop.

Try custom brushes too, some downloads here:

brushes1

You might want to duplicate the same layer a few times and erase parts out with a soft brush, then add paints splats and drips.

As said above clone stamp. Select a brush that looks like paint spray & make sure the two images are equal dimensions (or the size you want)

Elfin – thats what I’m after but two things:

1) is it possible to create a brush from an image which has multiple colours and keep those colours when its ‘sprayed’?
2) I can create a brush but all the images appear with the same orientation – can I make them appear upside down, at an angle etc?

I’d know how to do it in Illustrator, but not in Photoshop.

(…ponders…)

Hmm, yeah I dunno if you can spray full colour images as a brush preset. In Illustrator you can ‘spray’ lots of little tiny versions of something around yeah. Although that’ll of course be in Vectors so harder edges.

As for the orientation of each shape sprayed, you can alter this in Brushes Palette > Shape Dynamics > Angle Jitter..

I assume you are using a pen tablet thingy?

You can do it easily in Little Big Planet.

apart from the colour thing which I’ll keep playing with, thats spot on!

No I don’t think you can. I don’t think you can. Not in CS3 anyway.

Brushes can only be created in greyscale, not full colour. Colour Jittering allows for variations between foreground and background colour, but that’s about it.

Symbol Sprayer in Illustrator don’t seem to be all that versatile really. Well, you could fiddle about with the settings but it don’t seem to be as comfy to use as a PS brush. You don’t have the pen pressure sensitivity feature.

You need to get your head around masking. The mask is a greyscale image – can be a spray-painted splodge, whatever. You then use that spray-panted mask to reveal your colour image only where the “paint” is.

Put another way, have a layer with your image which you wish to use, then mask it fully and use a brush to rub away the full mask in the areas you want to use.

Use a mask and a new layer – don’t clone on top of your other layer, because you won’t be able to edit it after.