Brush thickness

[patrickching]

Hi,

We are making a children's book using Photoshop to create art. This is done on a Windows Surface Pro with the the stylus. However, we are unable to find a setting that will change the thickness of a brush stroke after it is made. The only options we've heard of is using applying a stroke or using Contract on the Modify menu. Is there a simpler option? We may need to use Illustrator instead but we wanted to double-check this.

Thank you

[JJMack]

The surface pro pen is pressure sensitive.  Depending one which model surface pro you have the api use  for pen support and the levels of pressure varies with pen and surface model.  Also the version of Photoshop you use may require that you use wintab api.  You have to configure everything to work together an install the software requited.   One they are  correct  the pressure you use on the pen should change brush dynamics like size and opacity.

[Trevor.Dennis · Accepted solution]

A variation on stroking a path would be to use the Freeform Pen tool, and to make it nicer, do so together with Lazy Nezumi Pro.  The Freeform Pen tool is not enabled with LNP by default, but you can do so via Settings > Edit Photoshop Options.  I use the Freeform Pen tool a lot, and got the idea of using it more from Bert Monroy, but it does not produce particularly nice lines as standard.  Of course you can remove a lot of the points and fine tune, but LNP reduces the need for that to virtually nill. 

Remember to drag each path to the New Path icon after making it it save it.  After setting Stroke path to the Brush tool, and deciding whether to use Simulate Pressure or not, you can there after run your strokes byt clicking on the relevant icon at the bottom of the path panel

You also have the option of Stroking with the brush size jitter set to Fade. This used a value of 1200, with spacing set to the default 25% (fade works with each stamp down of the brush, so brush spacing set to 10% would only stretch to 2/5ths of the path as in the red line example.