Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Sneha. And welcome to the
second class in my bite size Adobe
Illustrator series. In this class, I'm going to show you how to use
the Blob Brush, a really fun and
versatile drawing tool. As a professional
designer and illustrator, this is one of my
favorite tools, and I've used it a
countless number of times to create everything from cute and curdly animals to detailed floral
motifs and patterns. I'll talk you through the
basics of the Blob Brush, and then you'll be able
to follow along as I create various floral
elements to form a poster. As this is a bite size class, it's under 15 minutes in length. Prior experience using
Illustrator will be handy, but it's not strictly required, and I'll be talking you through
everything as I go along. I'll also be sprinkling
in some handy tips and tricks along the way.
So let's get started.
2. Tool basics: Before we begin, I'd
like to mention that if you don't have a subscription
to Adobe Illustrator, you can get a free
seven day trial from the Creative Cloud website. I've popped a link in
the Cloud description. Okay, so let's begin. I'm going to start by
opening a new document. Since we're making a poster, I'm going to go to
print and then A four. You can find the Blob Brush tool here on the left in the menu. If you don't see it right away, right click on the paintbrush
tool and select Blob Brush. The shortcut for Blob
Brush is Shift plus B. So first things first, what is the difference between the
paintbrush and the blob brush? Let me explain by showing you. I'm going to select
the paintbrush tool first and draw a squiggly line. This line that I've
just drawn is a path. If you're new to Illustrator, this basically means that it has a bunch of anchor points
along its stroke. Let me use the Direct
Selection tool to show you. So you can see all of
these anchor points here. So they're all
directly editable. So if you were to use the Direct Selection tool
and click on it and drag, you can see how you can modify each anchor point separately. When you draw something
using the paintbrush tool, you can also do
things like change the stroke width or
the style of stroke. Now, I'm just going to delete this and select the Blob
Brush tool instead. So I'm going to bring it up
by pressing Shift plus B. So now I'm going to draw
another quickly line with a Blob Brush tool. And if I select this now, you'll see that it's not a
path like the one above it. It's a shape, and it's got
anchor points appearing all along the edges that
you can now modify. Working with shapes
also makes it easy to combine and fill them
in using other tools, which I'll show you a
little later in the class. So now that you know the
basic difference between the paint brush and
the blob brush tool, let's start using it. Let me just delete this first. So the blob brush comes
with some options, which you can access by
double clicking on the tool. I come on to these
two options in a bit, but first let's take
a look at the slider, which controls how smooth
your stroke will be. If you move it towards the left, you get a more
accurate brush stroke, but any shakes and variations
will be a lot more visible. This is the Fidelity slider. And when you move
it to the right, it means that your stroke
looks smoother, but you're not getting
as much accuracy. So for the purposes
of this class, I'm going to leave
it at the midpoint. Here you've got options
for size, angle, and roundness, most
of which really only apply when you're using
a tablet with a stylus. I'm using a mouse, so I'm not going to be
modifying these. If you are using a tablet, they're worth exploring
because you can get some great custom results by configuring them in
the way that you want. Now, let's go back to
these two options here. To demonstrate what
they do, I'm going to uncheck both of these and close the dialogue box and draw a heart with a
block brush tool. A quick tip is that you
can change the size of your brush by pressing the left and right
square bracket keys. Okay, so I've drawn this heart. Once I've finished, you can
see that it isn't selected. But if I wanted to keep it
selected for some reason, say for editing it after, you can check the
Keep selected box. So let's try that again. I'll delete this heart here and double click
on Block Press to bring up the options and
click on Keep selected. Draw a heart again. Now
it remains selected, so I can make edits like changing the color or
modifying the shape. It's a good way to fill
in shapes that you have drawn and also just works really well to
speed up your workflow. Now let's look at
the other option, which is the merge
only with selection, which goes hand in hand
with keep selected. This means that any
subsequent shape that you draw will merge with
your previous one if, and this is very
important, they overlap. So let's see what that
looks like in action. I'm going to draw
yet another heart. And then I'm going
to draw a circle. So now if I use the selection
key using the V shortcut, can you see how they're just one shape if I move them around? If I didn't have them merge only with selection option selected, they would be two
separate shapes. Before you wrap up this lesson, I want to highlight something you might have already noticed. Since the block
Brush tool creates shapes from brush strokes
rather than paths, it automatically changes
a selected stroke color to a fill color when it's used. So if we look at the fill
and stroke box here, you can notice how the
stroke is set to black. But the moment I use
the block Brush tool, that swaps around,
and black becomes the fill and is therefore the color your shape
ends up being. So that's just something
to bear in mind. That's the basics of the blob
brush tool in a nutshell. It's a simple but powerful tool to draw and create shapes, especially when it comes
to illustration work. Take a few moments
to play around with the tool so you get
comfortable using it. When you're ready, let's put that to practice
in the next lesson.
3. Create a poster: Okay, so let's design an
abstract floral poster. I am starting with a
blank artboard again. I've also hand drawn a rough sketch of what I
want my poster design to be. You can grab this in the
class resources section, or you can create one of
your own if you'd like. I'm going to insert my scan
photo by going to file place, locating the file,
and dropping it in. I'm then going to
adjust the size so that it covers
the whole artboard. Then I click on the layers panel and lock it in place so
that it doesn't move. Next, I've got my
colors panel here. So I'm using these six colors, and you can, as well, or choose any that
you'd like to use. If you do want to use these, I've popped the hex codes and swatches for them in
the class resources. So I'm first going to create a background using
the rectangle tool. Now I will move it under the scanned sketch and lock it in place so that
it doesn't move either. I'll also adjust the opacity of the scanned sketch so that
it's just about visible. We want it acting like a guide without it getting distracting. Now, let's get painting
and blob brush. As I said in the
previous lesson, I'm using my mouse, so my tool option still
has it set in the middle, and I'm going to do my best to follow the shapes as much as possible with it smoothing
my lines accordingly. So for my illustration, I want a nice mix of
different colors. So I'm going to choose my first
color and start painting. Now, I'm going to start painting over some of these shapes, and I'll be wearing the size of my brush using the bracket
shortcuts as I go along. Since I've got the keep
selected and merge options on, it doesn't matter if
I go over something. It eventually becomes one shape. For the larger shapes,
while I can continue with the same approach of drawing the outline first and
then fitting it in, I'm going to show
you a quick shortcut using the Shape Builder tool. So what I'm going to do is draw the outline of
the shape first, using the Blob Brush tool. Then with it selected, I'm going to press Shift plus M to bring up the
Shape Builder tool. Then I simply drag it across it and it's all
combined and filled in. By the way, my first bite size Illustrator class was
all about Shape Builder, so check it out after this one if you'd
like to know more. And that's all there
is to it, really. I'm going to quickly do all of the other shapes
with different colors. Now I'm going to go
in and start adding in some details to the
shapes that I've made. You'll also notice that I didn't 100% stick to my base sketch because sometimes when you actually start
working in the file, you'll notice that some
things just look a little bit better or things just flow a
little bit more organically. So yeah, don't
feel like you have to stick to the
outline that you see. Ultimately, this is
an abstract piece. So just go with
whatever feels right. I'm also going to go and turn off my base sketch
layer now because I don't need it anymore since the overall piece
has come together, and I'm just adding
details at this point. So you'll notice as I'm doing this that all of the
shapes that I've drawn are all on different
layers in the layers panel. So you can always
move them around and change specific
colors if you like. You can also group
multiple layers together to move them
around as one unit. For example, if I want to
reposition this flower, I can just select
the whole thing. And do Command plus G.
So it's all one group, and then I can rotate it and
move it slightly as one unt. You can also modify
the shapes that you've created as well,
using the selection tool. If you want to make
them bigger or smaller, feel free to do that because
you don't always get the shape that you want just by drawing it right off the bat, so you can make any kind
of tweaks that you want. The main thing is
that the Block Brush tool allows you to create that initial base shape
really quickly and easily, especially if you
combine it with the Shape Builder tool
as well to fill it in. And that's it. That's the finished poster
using the block Brush tool.
4. Conclusion: Thank you so much for
watching my class. I hope you enjoyed it and are excited to start using
the Bro Brush tool. Once you've used it
a couple of times, you'll discover just how
natural and intuitive it is. It makes painting
illustrator a breeze. If you'd like to be notified
about the next class in this series and all other
future classes that I publish, please follow me
here on Skillshare. I also create videos on design, photography and travel over
on my YouTube channel, which is linked below, so
feel free to check that out. And if you found
this class useful, it would be great if you
could leave me a review. Thanks again, and I
will see you next time.
Sneha Kadaba, Illustrator and Designer
