Photoshop Painting

I've been doing some painting in Photoshop recently. It's been a while -- I generally don't have the need in my regular animation work -- so I've had to re-learn some stuff. One thing I forgot I knew about was how to make medieval chain mail the easy way. Here's how:

1. Open a separate document, and paint one link of the chain mail.
2. Select all, and define a new brush.
3. The settings of your new brush should make it easy to paint the mail on. So set your spacing, direction, pressure, etc. so you get something like this.
4. And paint in alternating directions to get the mail effect. You may even want to paint each direction on a separate layer, so you can add highlights across each layer.

I remembered this technique while working on this sketch: