Max Williams

I have had to make a few leather bags recently, and adding stitching to them seems like it should be difficult. But by using Photoshop’s brush features, it’s surprisingly easy.

1. Create a single stitch in a new document. Create a new document (about 500px × 500px) with the background set to white. Make sure the foreground colour is black by pressing ‘d’. Using the rounded rectangle tool with the radius set to something large, draw a box about the right shape for your stitch.
2. Define the stitch as a brush. Use the marquee tool to select the stitch. It doesn’t have to be accurate; Photoshop will ignore any white space so leave a comfortable margin. Then choose “Define Brush Preset…” from the Edit menu. Give it a useful name, like “Stitching”.
3. Set up the brush. Open or create your texture map in Photoshop, and open the brush palette. Select your new brush shape.
   1. In the “Brush Tip Shape” panel, you will probably need to set the angle to 90°.
   2. Adjust the spacing until it looks about right.
   3. Under “Shape Dynamics”, set “Control” under “Angle Jitter” to “Direction”.
   4. If the preview doesn’t look right, make sure that all the other jitters and pen controls are turned off. At this point, you can draw in your document with the brush tool (’b'). Set it to the correct size and colour for your thread. If you have a steady enough hand, you might be happy with this, and can skip to the end. If not, keep reading.
4. Draw the stitching paths. Choose the pen tool, and make sure it is set to draw paths rather than shapes or pixels. Trace along where you want your stitching to go. Remember you can edit the paths as much as you like once you have drawn them.
5. Trace the paths with the brush. Once you have your path perfected, it’s a good idea to duplicate it in the Paths palette. Name it, then click the “Stroke path with brush” button at the bottom of the palette.
6. Add realism to the stitching. Bevel and Emboss, Drop Shadow, Outer Glow or Pattern Overlay can all be useful here. Play with the layer style until you are happy with the way it looks.

If you need to, you can easily create a bump or height map from the mask.

The advanced features of the Brush tool often go unused in situations like this, because people think that they need to have a very steady hand to be this precise. But by making it follow a path, you can perfect the stroke before you are committed, and this allows it to become very useful.