Soulburn Studios Art Lessons

Weathering: How To Make A Dirt Brush
By Neil Blevins
Created On: July 20th 2025
Updated On: Oct 23rd 2025
Software: Photoshop or Procreate

A quick little tutorial showing how I make Dirt Brushes inside photoshop and procreate to use either to paint dirt and grime in a 2d painting, or on textures to be applied to 3d objects.

For more on the subject of using a dirt brush, check out Painting Dirt.

Photoshop Example

Here's a video showing how to make a dirt brush in photoshop

Here's some notes:

Take a photo of a dirty material (flat surfaces are the best).
Make a square selection and crop
Image - Adjustments - Desaturate
Using an existing brush, paint away white parts too close to the edge, to create something that's vaguely circular, but has an uneven edge.
Image - Levels, clamp the color so there's only black or white with very little grey
Using an existing brush, paint away some dirt to make it an even more uneven edge.
Select All
Edit - Define Brush Preset, give it a name
Add randomness to the brush, click the brush in the brush panel, turn on shape dynamics, turn up size jitter, angle jitter higher
Turn on scattering, and increase it a little bit
Go into brush tip shape, and increase spacing so there's more space in between each brush stamp
in the brush palette, click create new brush, give it the final name, now you have a new brush with all of your settings changed.

Procreate Example

First, make a dirt image for use as the tip of your brush. You can learn more on this technique by reading the tutorial on Weathering: Extracting A Dirt Pattern From A Photograph

1) Take a photo of a dirty material (flat surfaces are the best). For example, a photo like this:

From the Procreate gallery, click "Photo" and choose the photograph you've just taken.

2) Make it Black and White with Adjustments - Hue, Saturation, Brightness. Turn Saturation to 0%.

3) Give it more contrast using Adjustments - Curves, and in Gamma mode make it almost purely black and white. In this case, since we want the dirty part to be white and the background to be black, switch the position of the curve so the dot on the left moves to the right of the dot on the right.

4) Crop the image to a square by going to Actions - Canvas - Crop & Resize.

5) Using an existing brush, paint away white parts too close to the edge, to create something that's vaguely circular, but has an uneven edge.

6) Now you have your brush shape, send it back to the photos on your ipad by going to gallery, Select, select your canvas, clicking Share, Png, "Save Image". This will save this image to your ipad's photo library.

7) Open a fresh canvas, go to the Brush tool, click it twice, and hit the + icon and say "Create New Brush"

8) Go to Shape - Shape Source and hit the edit button

9) Import - import a photo, and import the brush shape you saved to your ipad's photo gallery

10) Under Shape properties, Increase Scatter value, this will rotate each part of your brush randomly as you paint

11) Turn on Flip X and Flip Y for more randomness

12) Under Stroke Path, increase spacing higher, you can also turn jitter Lateral and Jitter Linear up a little bit.

Exercise

If you really want to drive the point home, it's time to make your own brush! Go outside and take a photo of dirt and then make yourself a dirt brush for your own use using the techniques above in your favorite 2d painting app.