Who likes beards? I know I do... And here's a way how to add a beard (yes, of any sort), to any image you might have...

The first step is to create a custom brush, a Beard Brush:

Open up Photoshop and create a new decent sized image with a transparent background. I made the canvas size 250 x 250 pixels.

Paint down some black strands of curly hair. Make it look fairly natural. You can even take it to a further step and smudge out the ends of each follicle, to give the hair a more tapered and natural look. Here's what I've made:

There we go...
I've made the hairs somewhat curvy, and smoothed and smudged out the ends. These little details will make the hair look a bit better when it goes down in full force.

Also to note, this particular hair brush I made with a 2 Point brush tool. I have noticed this makes much more of a manly and formidable beard. I'd have nothing less. You can use whatever you want, though. You'll soon end up going back and selecting 1 and 2 point brush AND pencil tools, and different styles, to get the best feel and effect.

Once you're ready, turn the whole thing into a custom brush. Click:
Edit -> Define Brush Preset...

All you have to do now is name your brush, and then do some fine tuning.

Open up an image of someone's face (god, I hope it's someone's face. Sicko). Then select your brush. You'll notice right away that it may be too large for your image, although it's always best to work with large images. But also apart from that, the brush is totally uniform!

You don't want that kind of brush. When painting something like a beard in real life, notice how you move your hand around in different angles? We need to tell Photoshop how to kick up the randomness of how it paints down each brush stroke.

Select you're awesome Beard Brush, then press F5...

I usually follow this setup as shown in this first picture shown.

I like to max out the size variation, and the angle variation, too. Following what I've done for this setting will give it a totally random stroke every time.

Follow what I've done here for the Color Dynamics, just to get started. Once you've messed around you can go back and change it as you see fit.

This will give the brush strokes a less uniform colour, causing it to look a bit more natural. In any case you'll do a few passes with the Beard Brush with different colours to give highlights and such.

Feel free to mess around as much as you want, the great thing is the preview window that will give you a delicious taste of the beard you are creating...

All you really need to do now is give it a try. Hit google and look for some random head shots or grab some pictures of your friends and go nuts.

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