Photoshop offers a wide selection of ready-made brushes at your disposal. I'll admit it, a large portion of the time, I rely on the presets for my work. However, it really is super quick and very easy to create your own custom brushes. Most important is becoming familiar with the Brush panel and experimenting with the various settings. There's a ton of options, which can seem intimidating at first, but the more you use them, the less scary they are.
Let's make some confetti! In a new document, hit the B key, or select the brush tool from your tool bar. Select a hard, square brush from the Brush Preset picker. I chose the 16 px square. If the square brushes are not visible to you, click on the triangle in the upper right of the panel, scroll down to Square Brushes and then Append. Next, toggle open the Brush panel. Move the Spacing slider to the right so that there is some space between the squares.
Next, click on Shape Dynamics and crank the Size Jitter up to 100%, the Angle Jitter to 85%, Roundness Jitter to 100% and the Minimum Roundness to about 13%. Under Scattering, increase the Scatter slider to about 1000% and the Count to 2.
At this point we're looking pretty good. The shapes appear at different angles and appear to have some depth.
Next, we can add some texture to simulate a crepe paper surface. Under Texture, choose Driven Snow from the presets, at a Scale of 21% and a Depth of 45%. Set the blend mode to Multiply.
Skip down to Color Dynamics and set both the Foreground/Background Jitter and the Hue Jitter to 100%. Select a bright color for the foreground and background. I picked a cyan and a yellow. Under Transfer, set the Opacity Jitter to 16%.
At this point, I think we've got some pretty realistic-looking confetti.
If you are happy with how your brush looks, click the Create a New Brush icon in the bottom right corner of the palette and give it a name. Now your brush is saved for future use!
For the rest of the image at the top of this post, I created a couple other simple brushes set with wide spacing. A 'doughnut' shape brush made the burst from the bottle and the plain square became my type. Keeping the angle and jitter off here helped keep things legible.
I hope your 2012 was successful, and I wish you a happy, healthy, inspired 2013!
