Cacti with DIY Brushes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Cacti with Custom Brushes Introduction A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create Cacti with DIY Brushes in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at illustrating images of cacti, and we're going to do it with our own custom made brushes. We're going to be looking at making our own pattern brushes, our own art brushes, and our own scatter brushes to get the effects that we're looking for. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class and learning something from it, would you do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, just write a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started illustrating cacti with our own custom made brushes in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Prepare the Cactus Leaf: To get started with our cactus, we're going to create a new document. I'm using one, that's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size, RGB Color mode. If you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, you're going to work with a dialogue like this. You'll just set the size and the color mode, click the "Create Document". Now, we're going to start with the leaf of [inaudible] or our cactus. I'm going to select the "Ellipse Tool" and I'm going to make sure that I'm working with a stroke, but no fill. I'm just going to drag out an ellipse. Then I'm going to drag out a rectangle and place it over the bottom of the ellipse. What I'm looking for here is this shape. So I'm going to cut the bottom of the ellipse off with the rectangle. I'm just looking for a shape that starts coming back in on itself. I'll select both of the shapes and go to the Pathfinder palette. If you don't see this, you can choose "Window" and then Pathfinder. You're going to select "Minus Front", because the rectangle's in the front, that's going to subtract the rectangle from the ellipse. Now you want a second one of these ellipses, so I'm going to get my Layers palette here so that we can set. I'm going to drag this path onto the new icon, and that makes a duplicate. We want them stacked on top of each other. I'm going to turn the top version off and I'm going to the bottom version. I don't want it to have a stroke, and I want it to be filled with a cactus green. We're just going to call this cactus green. Now I'm going to the top one. I'm going to turn the bottom one off for a minute. Now with the top one, I want the outside line here, but I don't want the line across the bottom. So I'm going to the "Direct Selection Tool" and I'm just going to select over the bottom line here. When I press Delete, the bottom line disappears, leaving me the outside line. The fact that that's black is just fine because that's a nice edge for my cactus. So let's put the two pieces back together again. Having done that, we're going to lock them down. Now I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'm going to the "Pen Tool". Now, if you really hate the Pen Tool, that's fine because this is not really that difficult to do. What you're going to do is you're going to come in about, probably about this much on the bottom line here. You'll probably see a little indicator that says path. You're going to click with your left mouse button and drag-in about this direction. It's not rocket science, just generally in this direction is fine. Now I've got what's called rubber band showing here. If you don't see it, that's fine. You're just going to head up to the top here, and you're going to click and drag. Now I'm going to let go the left mouse button and I'm going to press Escape. That just gives me a line. Let's just click away from it. This is what we're looking for; one of the lines for our cactus. Now having made that line, you're going to do yourself a favor and lock it down. Because in a minute, it's going to try and attach itself to another line if you don't do that. So back to the Pen Tool. Let's go back to here. Click and drag with the left mouse button, up, let go. Go to where we want to end up, click and drag. Make a curvy line, press Escape, lock it down. You're going to do that a few more times. Now we have all aligns for our cactus. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and add the little spiky bits using brushes. 3. Pt 2 Add spikes to the leaf: The next step is to add the spiky bits to our cactus. For this we're going to use a brush and we're going to create the brush ourselves. I'm going to the line segment tool. I'm going to drag out a line. If I hold the Shift key as I do it, it's going to be perfectly horizontal. It's a one pixel black line and the line has no fill. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to use the pencil tool to draw some additional lines. If you double-click on the Pencil Tool, you get to access the Pencil Tool options. You want it to be tending towards the smooth end. In earlier versions I've illustrated, you might have multiple sliders here, but what you want to do is to select something that is just short of smooth. That way Illustrators going to remove the worst of the bumps from your line, but it's still going to have a little bit of an organic fill. You're going to deselect all of these options. You can leave Selected, Edit, Selected paths, but the other ones all need to be deselected and click ''Okay.'' Now with the pencil tool, first of all, I'm going to select away from the line, so I don't join up the line and I'm just going to draw in a few little spikes for my characters. We're just looking for something about like this. Now, I am going to shorten this line a little bit. I just think it's a little bit long. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key as I dragging on it to just shorten. It the distance between these spikes is going to be the sum total of this line. There's going to be quite a distance between each set of spikes. Now there's going to be an inherent problem with this if we create it as a brush and I'm going to show you what the problem is and then what the solution is. Let's just go and create this as a new brush, it's going to be a pattern brush. I'm going to click ''Okay''. Now, in later versions of Illustrator you get automatically created corner tiles, you don't want or need them. You can just disable them. In earlier versions of Illustrator, you don't get that option, so just ignore it because life's good for you because you don't want to use them anyway, so just click ''Okay.'' Let's go back to our shape, and I'm going to select this outer line here, which means I need to just turn the locks off on all of these shapes and just locate this outer line here. I'm going to click to add my pattern brush to that line. Let's zoom in and let's see what the problem is. The problem is that the line around our shape is running through the middle of our brush. Even if we were to make the spikes on the outside, which is where they should be, I'm just going to double-click on my brush. I'm going to flip it across the line here and click ''Okay''. Even though the spikes are now pointing outwards, you can say that the brush line is inside the shape and it should be right on the line. Well, we're going to have to adjust our brush to make it paint on the line. I'm going to press ''Control or Command 0'' to zoom back out. I'm going to zoom in over my brush shape. This is what we're going to do to solve the problem. First of all, I'm going to make sure I don't have anything selected. I'm just going through the selection tool, I'm just going to click somewhere to deselect everything. You can see here, nothing is selected. Then I'm going to the pen tool and I'm going to turn off the stroke and the fill, so I've no stroke and no fill. I'm going to hover here, right opposite this line here. When I hover there, you can see that the smart guides are appearing. If I just click once here now, I'm going to create a point right opposite the topmost one of these spikes, and now I'm going to press ''Escape''. I have one point here. I'm going to select it with the Selection Tool. Now I want to reflect it over this line here. I'm going to select the Reflect tool, and it sits underneath the rotate tool. I'm going to hold the Alt key on the PC, that would be the Option key on the Mac. I'm going to hover over the middle of this line and I'm going to click once. This opens the Reflect Dialogue, it also positions this as the point for reflection. This point up here is going to be reflected across this point here, which is going to land it all the way down here. If you have horizontal set, so you're going to select Horizontal, you're going to turn Preview on, and you're going to click ''Copy''. That leaves me with all these elements for my brush, this line from my brush, and then a dot here and a dot here. The dots are going to help us align this brush perfectly across the line. What we're going to do is select everything here, and because there's so many component pieces to this, I suggest you group it just so that you don't get a mess in your Layers panel. There's the group. What we're going to do is since we went to the trouble of already creating this brush, let's just update it. We're going to the selection tool. We're going to drag this brush all the way up here. I'm going to hold the Alt key on the PC, the Option key on the Mac as I drop it into place. What that does is it updates the brush, so it's still got the settings that had previously, but it's got this new slightly different shape. I'm going to click ''Okay''. I'm going to click ''Apply to Strokes''. Anywhere where that old brush was applied, the new one is now applied in place. You can see that the spikes are now all the way around the edge of our cactus. What we need to do now is to create some spiky edges for the middle line. What we're going to do is to bisect on the line that we already have. I'm going to come down here and I'm going to draw out a similar length line. This is going to use this as a guide, it's going to be black and it's going to be one pixel. I'm going to the pencil tool, and I'm going to draw lines about the same size, and again in the middle. This is going to be the middle prickle for my cactus. Again, I need it to reflect correctly, but this time it's going to be a little bit hard for me to work out whether this one sticks out further than any of these. Instead of trying to work out which is the furthest away from the line, I'm just going to put a little pixel point here that's will clear off the line. When I reflect it, it's going to be perfectly reflected, and it's going to encompass all the shapes here. I'm just going to press ''Escape''. I see here that it's got a stroke, so I'm just going to turn the stroke off. I've got my little point here that has no fill and no stroke and it reflected across this line, so I'm going to the reflection tool. I'm going to hover over the very middle of the line here, hold the Alt key on the PC, that would be the Option key on the Mac, and click ''Once''. I'm going to select Horizontal, making sure preview is turned on, so I can't see that's reflecting. These two paces that are reflecting a well outside the ambit of the elements that I want to be my brush. It's not going to be pushed out of alignment. These are going to control it absolutely perfectly. I'm going to click ''Copy''. Now, again, because I've got so many pieces that make up this brush shape, all of these pieces here, I'm going to group them, object group. Now we're going to make a brush out of these, but it's going to need to be a new brush because we don't have one that we can use. I'm going to click here, choose new brush. It's going to be a Pattern Brush click ''Okay''. Of course we don't need our corner tiles, so we're going to disable that. Earlier versions of Illustrator doesn't matter. You're not going to use corner tiles anyway click ''Okay''. Let's go back to our leaf shape, and I've unlocked everything here, so what I'm going to do is just select all these middle bits. I can do that by clicking on the four of them in turn, holding the Shift key as I do so, so that they're all selected and click here once on my Brush, and that applies the brush to each of those lines. Now I have the first leaf for my cactus. What I'm going to do is select it, and I'm going to group it for convenience, so that we have a cactus leaf if you like. Then let's turn this into a brush. You can actually have brushes inside brushes. I'm going to click here, and choose new brush. This time I'm going to create an art brush. It's not a pattern brush, we used a Pattern Brush for the repeated elements here, we're going to create an art brush for our leaf. I'm going to click ''Okay". This is going to be cactus leaf. I'm going to click here on Scale Proportionately. Now, we're going to have the option of changing this later on, but you may want to choose that for now. I'm going to select Hue shift from my colorization, which will allow me to colorize this a little bit differently if I want to. I'm noting that the direction of the stroke is down. Anytime I want my leaf to be drawn, I need to draw it from the pointy end to the flat end. I'm just going to click ''Okay''. Now we've created a cactus leaf and we're going to come back in the next video, we're going to put together our cactus plant. 4. Pt 3 Put it together: At this stage, I'm ready to go and create my cactus plants. I'm going to select all of these elements and just move them to one side so I can create my plant in here. I'm going to click away to make sure that nothing is selected and I'm going to my brush. I'm also going to go and select a sort of green color. Now, I can select the same green color as I started my cactus to be, or I could choose a different color. I'm going to select my brush, so I'm drawing with my cactus brush now and I'm just going to start at the top of the cactus. I'm just going to draw down, and there is the first leaf. If you don't like it, just Control Z to undo it and draw a different one. Now, I want this one to go into a flat part. I really wanted to draw as a fairly straight line. I'm going to be a little bit more careful this time. Now I'm going to draw a leaf to this side and it's going to be slightly smaller. At this stage, I'm not worried that it's showing over the top of the cactus plant, was going to sort that out in just a minute. Draw another leaf and probably another one, and maybe one here. Actually, let's just undo that. Let's do one the wrong way round. If you make a leaf that's the wrong way round, you can turn it the right way round by clicking on the Pen tool. What you're going to do is you're going to zoom in here and you're going to pick up the line that you drew and if you click on the end of the line with the pen tool, you're going to rotate the line. Lines have direction now you might not be able to see it, but they do have directions. You saw that when you drew from the outside and your leaf went in the right direction. Well, if you accidentally do a brush in the wrong direction, you can easily change it by just clicking on the point here with the pen tool and that reverses the direction of the line. I'm going to press Escape because I don't want it to be joined. Let's go back out. At this point we sort of have our cactus, but I would prefer that these leaves were behind the basic shapes. It's going to move this one down a little bit and let's go and reverse the order of these leaves, so what I'm gonna do is select all these five paths that make up this cactus. But I'm not actually clicking this dot here. I'm just selecting the paths and going to the fly out menu, and I'm going to choose reverse order and that's simply reverses the order in the Layers palette, which means that the big part of my cactus is in front and all the other little bits are behind. Now you also have the ability to change how these strokes are applied to your lines. I'm going to select this line here and I'm going to click here on options of selected object and at the moment it's set to proportional. But if I disable proportional and then reduce the fixed, I can get a slightly different look to my leaf and you may want that look, so I'm just going to click "Okay." I'm going to do that to both of these here and this one. Again, I'm going to options of selected object which doesn't actually change the brush itself. It's only changing the brush so far as these individual elements are concerned. I can just adjust them if I wish. I'm getting slightly different shape to my brushes. If you don't like that, you can just leave it the way it came. Now we're going to need a pot plant for our cactus. Let's go and make one just using the pen tool. Very simply I'm going to mark out a sort of top for my pot plant and because this has got a sort of organic look to it, I'm not going to make it look perfect. With its selected, I'm going to choose a sort of dark brown for the stroke and then for the fill, I'm going to select a sort of lighter brown and I'm just going to increase the stroke to two pixels. Let's put that over the top of the cactus and let's draw in a base for the cactus. It's inheriting the same properties in my case as the previous shape re-put it into position. But I'm just going to reverse these two paths so that it looks like a pot plot. I can group this and then just move them, should I wish to do so. Now you can also add little flowers to your cactus. What we're going to do is to create a little flower for our cactus. I'm going to select the ellipse tool. I'm going to draw a very small long ellipse and I'm going to zoom in here so we can see it. Now I don't want it to have a strokes so am going to turn the stroke off and I want it to be filled with a sort of orangey color. At this point, you can reshape your petals should you wish to do so by just selecting on a petal point with the direct selection tool and you can make it a sort of interesting shapes should you wish to do so. I'm going to select it, I'm going to choose Effect distort and transform and then transform. Am going to turn preview on, and I'm going to transform around the middle bottom point. Now, I want this to have eight leaves, so I'm going to make seven copies so that the original plus seven copies and so I don't have to do the math. I'm going to type 360 because that's the number of degrees in a circle. I'm going to divide it by the eight leaves that I want and when I hit the tab key, illustrated does the math for me. I'm just going to click, "Okay." I'm going to add a sort of circle shape into the middle of my cactus flower. Now, as you're drawing a shape, you can move it around if you just hold the space bar as you're moving it, but that's why you're still drawing it. I'm going to give it a sort of darker red center. Now at this point I'm going to select [inaudible] and I'm going to choose Object Expand Appearance, so we expand it into its components shapes. You'll see here that it is a group of groups. Again, we're going to choose Object Ungroup and an Object Ungroup until our flower is just a series of shapes and then we're going to group it back up again. I just don't see a point of having a really untidy layers palette. It can get really untidy really quickly. Ungrouping things and then regrouping into a single group, then that is your flower, just makes better sense to me. Now that we've done that, we could just land our flower on top of our cactus pieces or we could create it as a brush itself. I'm going to select it and click on the brush. This is going to be an art brush. Going to choose new brush. Brush. Okay. Now we can either have it stretched to fit the stroke length or scale proportionately. You can choose either. If you want to be able to change its color, choose huge shift and click, "Okay." Now I'm going to brush tool and just going to brush in my flower. Now the scaling method that I used is ensuring that my little flower is flattening out when it's attached to the end of the cactus. If we wanted it to be full length, we'll just draw it as full length. But you can see it's sort of smushed up the way it would be on a cactus if we're just drawing small strokes so that's a really nice option to use. I'm just going to get rid of these, don't need them anymore. There's my master flower, and here is my cactus drawing. It's being created from brushes that we created so we've got a leaf brush and sort of cactus leaf brush. We've got the cactus flower brush and then we also have brushes for spikes and they were incorporated in that leaf brush. 5. Pt 4 Watercolor Cactus Brush: For our second cactus drawing, we're going to use some watercolor brushes. Now, if you've previously done my water color effects class for Illustrator, you probably already have these brushes. If you haven't done that watercolor text effect plus, then you will need these brushes. I'm going to give you the download link in the class project area. It's just a little bit confusing when you come to this website, you're looking around and going, okay, well, where's my download? Well the download is over here, it says Download Attachments, so you're just going to click to download it. What you're going to do is you're going to get a file that is going to be free one watercolor brushes zip and when you get that, you're going to double-click on it. On a Windows machine, that's going to give you the chance to extract it on a Mac, it's probably going to extract it automatically for you. Then you're just going to open the watercolor brushes up in Illustrator. You're going to end up with a document that looks like this, but in the brushes panel are all the watercolor brushes that come with this file. What you need to do, because this file is pretty big, is determine which ones you actually want to use. What I like to do is to just go and remove the ones that I don't want. I just Shift click on any of that I don't want and I'm just going to press the Delete Brush and click Yes. I'm not going to actually save this file, but I'm going to save the brush set. I'm going to come through here and get rid of everything that I don't need for whatever it is that I happen to be doing. In this case for the cactus, I really only want green brushes. I'm going to get rid of everything that doesn't qualify as being a green or nearly green brush. Once you've paired it down to a useable group of brushes, what you're going to do is click the flyout menu and you're going to choose save brush library. Then you're going to come to a folder which Illustrator is going to choose for you, which is where you're going to save your brushes. Now, I've already got heaps and heaps of watercolor brush sets already, but you're just going to type whatever you need to type to identify that these brushes. I'm just going to call those cactii brushes. Click Save. That's just saved the brush file, it hasn't saved the watercolor brushes file and I don't want to save it since I just removed all those beautiful watercolor brushes from it. I just don't want them right now so I'm going to click this and I'm just going to say No to saving it. I've got the brushes where I can use them. I don't need to save the changes to the file that I just took the brushes out off. Now we'll choose File, New, and we're going to create a 1000 by 1000 pixel document, RGB color exactly the same as we did earlier and click Create. We're going to open up our brushes. We're going to fly out menu, open brush library, User-defined, and here are your cactus brushes. So I'm just going to click there and that gives me access to my green brushes that I saved out of that watercolor file so that I could use them for my next cactus. My next cactus is going to be drawn using first of all, a rectangle tools and this is going to draw out, it's long rectangle. This is going to be one of those typical Arizona cactuses of long stick with bent arms on it. We're going to start by creating a shape that has no fill, but it has a stroke and that's going to be our rectangle. Then I'm going to add an ellipse over it. I'm going to use the smart guides here to just line everything up because I want to draw an ellipse that fits over the top of this rectangle. I want it to line up really nicely. If I need to, I can just move the rectangle up a little bit until they join up nicely. Now the last cactus that we made had an open-ended bottom on it. Now, you may not want that to be the case so let's create a cactus here that has a base on it. What we're going to do is add another ellipse to the bottom here, just using these smart guides to drag out this ellipse so it's about the same size as my rectangle, and then just move it into position here. You can also tweak the top of your characters by clicking on the topmost point here using the direct selection tool and then you can just bend it to suit, but I'm pretty happy with mine. I'm going to select over all of these shapes, I'm going to the Pathfinder and I'm going to click Unite. That's making one shape out of all of those other shapes. Now, if you've got bumpy bits, you can always smooth it out by choosing Object Path and then choose Simplify. With Preview turned on, you can just adjust the slide, as you can see that the original shape had 10 points. Well, I can get it down to eight points, which is removing some of the extra points that I have there so I can just click Okay. This is going to be the basic shape from my cactus brush, but I need two of them as I did before, one for the lines and one for the fill. I'm going to take this shape and I'm going to drop it onto the new icon. I'm going to turn off and lock down one of those shapes. I'm going to work with just one of them for now, but I need something to fill it with and I'm going to use a watercolor brush. I'm going to select this particular one. I'm just going to drag it out of the brushes palette, and that gives me a watercolor shape. Now, it's too skinny to fit over here, so I'm just going to stretch it a bit. It's watercolor, it doesn't matter if you stretch it. I'm also going to rotate it around. I'm going to test that it actually fits over my cactus leaf, which it doesn't quite so again, I'm just going to stretch it a bit more. It needs to cover up my cactus leaf entirely. Now, when you drag a brush out of the brushes palette like that, it comes out as a group to objects, so here it is up here. But at the very bottom of that group object is a no fill, no stroke rectangles. I am just going to scroll all the way down to the end here and pick up this one shape at the very end, which is this rectangle and you're just going to delete it, because you don't need it. Next up, we're going to take this shape here. We're going to place it over the top of our watercolor object, but we need it to be at the very top of the stack. I'm going to choose Object, Arrange, Bring to Front, and that brings it to the very top. In the layer palette here, I'm checking that I've got my path, which is at the very top, and my group, which is all of my watercolor elements. I'm going across here to the Pathfinder and I'm going to click here on Crop. What that does is it gets rid of all the watercolor elements that do not fit inside this shape so everything is cropped to this size. Now, working with these watercolor brushes can have an overhead on your computer so if you're struggling a little bit, make sure that you have closed everything that you can possibly close while you're working on them now, I don't need my watercolor brushes anymore. In the next video, we'll go ahead and finish this brush and create a cactus. 6. Pt 5 Finish the brush and draw the cactus: Now, I have this cactus leaf shape and this group of objects that has been cropped to that shape. Now, I'm just having a look through the objects that I have here because down the bottom, if there are any no fill, no strike paths, they're going to be at the very bottom of the collection and there are some, I don't need to carry these with me. I'm just going to select the last one, roll up till I find the top most one which is here, Shift click, and I'm going to drag them all and drop them onto the trash can, because there are many objects here, you do not want to be carrying around objects that don't have any stroke or fill on them. For some reason thankfully, Illustrator manages to just pile them all up at the bottom of the group, they're really easy to find, but there were a lot of them there. I'm just going to go back up here and just close down my group. This part of my cactus leaf, the rest of my cactus leaf is sitting over here. I'm going to put it on top of everything else and I'm going to move it into position. It's placed over the top of the water color objects, and I'm going to lock down the watercolor objects., and I'm also going to lock down this top path so that I can go and draw the same lines as I did earlier inside my cactus leaf. Click and drag with the pen tool. Come down to the bottom here, and just click and drag a little bit to make a shape. If the shape needs adjusting, you then press Escape to finish drawing it and then you're going to select the direct selection tool and just work on making the curve of this line a little bit better for the cactus leaf. When you've done the first one, lock it down and go and create the next ones. You want to come all the way down to the very bottom of the cactus leaf, press Escape, adjust it if necessary and then lock it down. This is going to be our cactus leaf, at this point I can unlock everything. I can select either all of these objects and I can put them in a group with object and then group. I'm going to zoom back out. I'm going to select either all of these objects and I'm going to make an art brush from them. I'm going to the brushes palette, I'm going to click the new button, click new brush, and it's going to be an art brush, I'll click, "Okay". Now, in earlier versions of Illustrator, you don't have the ability to stretch these between guides, but in later versions of Illustrating you do, if you want the ability to make this quite a bit longer, you can just select stretch between guides and then just move the guide down, it's well inside the shapes. You're not stretching this part of the shape, but you will stretch this long part and then you can just wind up on the bottom here. Again, you won't be stretching the end of the shape, but you'll just be stretching all these areas if necessary in between these two guides. But if you don't have that, don't worry, just use one or other of these two options because it's very easy for you to pick and choose between them later on. I'm going to click, "Okay" noting that I'm going to be drawing my brush from the tip down. Now, I'm going to move this out of the way and let's have a go at drawing our Arizona inspired cactus. I'm going to the brush tool, I'm going to make sure I have selected my cactus brush and I'm going to draw my starting place of cactus and now I can draw in the bent arms. I can select either any of these lines and I can adjust them individually by selecting here options of selected object. At this stage, I might just want to wind this one down a little bit, it's not quite as thick. It's scaling down in size as the arm becomes smaller because that's going to be one of the newer branches on the cactus and click," Okay" and you can scale these other ones, you can move them around. If you want one of these arms to be behind the cactus then you're just going to select it and then move it down in the last palette is positioned behind the cactus. But because we created it with this really nice end on it, it's very easy for you to place it either in front or behind the cactus, and of course this one could have flowers on it as well. Let's go and make a small flower for this cactus. This time I'm just going to make a small red filled shape. I'm going to Alt or option drag a couple of shapes away and I'm going to rotate the outer ones. I'm going to move them back in to create a single little flash shape. At this point I can go to the Pathfinder, I'm going to click unite to make just a single shape out of this selective, and while I'm here make it into a brush, it's going to be an art brush because we just want one instance of it. It's not going to be a pattern brush or a scatter brush and just click Okay. It's going to paint from the top down, that's fine, and it can be stretched to fit the stroke length, that will be fine I'll click "Okay". Now, let's go and brush that into position. Firstly, I'm going to make sure I don't have anything selected. I'm going to click on my brush, make sure that my new flower brush is selected and I'm just going to place some flowers on my cactus. There's another cactus again that's been created using art brushes. But in this case we've filled the shape with a watercolor element to give it a little bit of a organic look. 7. Pt 6 Gradient Cactus Leaf: For our last cactus leaf, I'm again going to choose the same size document as we've been working on. A 1000 by 1000 pixels RGB color, I'll click create. I'm going to base this cactus leaf on an oval. I'm just drawing out an ellipse and I can make changes to that ellipse as I work. I can make it a little bit more like a sort of cactus leaf, should I wish to? I'm just going to bring the bottom of it down and the ends of it in a little bit. It's going to be my cactus leaf. I'm going to select this shape and I'm going to make a duplicate with edit copy, edit paste in place. You could, of course, I open up the last pallet. You could go and select that object and just drop it onto the new icon that would have exactly the same effect. I'm going to turn off and lock down the topmost versions so that I'm only going to be working on the bottom copy of this object. I'm going to turn off the stroke and for the fill, I'm going to use a gradient so I'm going to click on the gradient tool here. I'm going to click on this end of the gradient, double-click and choose a color to use, which is going to be this sort of yellowy color. Double-click on the other end and choose a different color. I want this to be a radial gradients, so I'm going to click on radial gradient. I want to push the yellow further out to the edges of the gradient. I'm going to click on this little slider here and move it closer to the darker green end. You can see that that's pushing the yellow out. Now, if your version of Illustrator does not have this gradient tool with this little arm here, just ignore this because it's not really needed. I am going to slightly reshape my gradient here and you can do that using this tool. But if you don't have it, this is not by any means instrumental to this particular class so I'm just going to click away from the shape. I've got a shape with a gradient fill. I'm going to lock it down. I'm going to make visible the topmost shape, the topmost version of this object, and unlock it so I can work with it. Well, I don't want it to have a fill. For the outside edge, I want to make one of my little brushes so I'm just going to zoom in up here and let's go and make a small brush. Taking the line segment tool, drawing out a small line of just one pixel, I'm going to click away from the line so that the pencil tool doesn't try and alter it. Going to click on the pencil tool and because this is going on the outside of my cactus, so I'm just going to put the little prickles on one side of the line. Now we're going to need to do the same little trick with the pen tool. I have nothing selected here. Going to the pen tool, make sure it's no fill, no stroke. Now it's going to be pretty easy to work out, which is the tallest of these little objects I'm going to look at with my smart guides until I've got that selected, I'm just going to click once to put an anchor point at that position. Press the Escape key, going to go straight to the selection tool which selects this little object. Click the Reflect tool, hover over the middle of my line. Hold the Alt key on the PC, say that would be the Option key on the Mac and click once. That opens up the reflect dialogue, will select Horizontal will turn preview on. You want to make sure that you've got a second selection just below the line. When you've got that click Copy. These are all the elements that will go together to make our brush. I'm going to select off everything. I'm going to group it just so it's easily located inside the layers panel. There's not like five objects sitting there and I'm going to make a pattern brush out of it. You can click here and choose new brush. Or you can click here and choose pattern brush, click OK. We don't want the corners because we're not making corners these are cacti. If you're version of Illustrator doesn't have that tool, don't worry, you're just going to click OK. Control or commands the arrow to go back out. I'm going to click on this shape that we're working on and I'm going to click on my brush. You can say that my cactus prickles have gone all the way around the edge of my cactus. Now we're ready to go and make a scatter brush that's going to be the prickles inside the cactus. Like to base it on the size of this brush here so I'm going to make it so I can see this brush here. I'm just going to make a small shape here that will be my prickle shape say to be a sort of organic shape. I'm going to select over all of these objects, I'm going to choose object expand. Now this has no fill, but it does have a stroke. I'm going to turn fill off, just want to expand the stroke and I'll click OK. You can see the various objects here. I'm going to just choose object ungroup because they're all in groups. With those three objects selected, I'm going to the Pathfinder, which you can get to by choosing Window and then Pathfinder just going to click unite so end up with a single shape here. That is what's going to be my scatter brush. I'm going to select that shape, going to the brushes palette, new brush, scatter brush, OK and at this stage, I'm just going to click OK. Control or commands the arrow to go back out, am going back to the pencil tool, but first making sure that nothing is selected. With my pencil tool, I'm just going to run some loops through my leaf here. We're going to apply the scatter brush to this. It's here in the layers palette and doesn't have any fill or any stroke. That's why we're not seeing it, but you always will see it your layers palette. We're just going to click here on the scatter brush and that applies to the scatter brush to the line, doesn't look very good at all. Let's double-click on the scatter brush to change its settings. One of the things that we want to do is we want to increase the spacing. It's going to go to random spacing, going to wind up the spacing to probably around 300 to 400. That's going to be a bit random within those parameters. Maybe not quite so much, but you can settle for something that looks good to you. With the scatter, I'm going to randomly scatter these either side of the line. That's going to break that sort of line look, don't want to scatter them too much so that they go outside the edge of your shape, that you may want to apply a scatter to them. For rotation, I want that at random and I want it from minus 180 to plus 180. In other words, all of these are rotated somewhat from the original so that they look a little bit uneven. At this point you can adjust whatever you think needs adjusting and just click OK. We're going to apply to strokes, want that new change to be applied to the strokes inside our shape here. This is going to be our brush in the next video. We're going to look at converting this to a brush because there's a little bit of work to be done to it before it can be a brush. 8. Pt 7 Make the Brush: Now at this point to convert this into a brush, we're going to need to unlock everything, we're going to select over all three objects that go to make up a leaf. That's the line that we drew with the pencil tool. The outside edge that has the prickles on it and the inside shape, which is the gradient fill. I'm going to click on New Brush and click art brush and click OK and Illustrators telling me that the selected artwork contains an element that can't be used as an art brush, just doesn't tell me what that is. The issue is with this gradient filled shape. So let's go to the gradient filled shape and let's expand it. So we'll choose object expand. I wanted to expand the fill and I want to use 255 shades of color to get my gradient sort of look I'll click Ok. So what I get here now is a clipping group with a whole heap of shapes, every one of them layered on top of each other to get me this final sort of gradient filled shape but it's no longer a gradient it's just lots of different shapes. So let's just close that all down. Let's re-select everything again, these three objects and now let's see if we can create our art brush, which of course we can. So at this stage all I need to do is to select my starting brush scale option but since we can change it, it's not really critical. We're not going to set a colorization method. We're going to note that we are going to be painting from the top-down and click OK. So let's move all of this out to one side. I have nothing selected going to click on my brush tool, click on my leaf and now I can start drawing my cactus. So there's the first leaf. I'm going to draw a few side leaves and immediately I can say that the scaling on this brush is just not working for me at all. So I'm going to select this line here. Click the options of selected object. I'm just going to scale this down. I can choose proportional if I wish. So you can just decide what I want to do here for the best look for my characters. Of course I can move those into position as well. If you want to extend the bottom leaf or you need to do is to click and drag on it. So now we've finished creating their leaves for the cactuses. It's one more thing I wanted to have a look at before we give it a vase and finish it off. 9. Pt 8 Resize the brush shapes: Now what I want to look at is a special case of having a look at this leaf perhaps here, and deciding that the prickles were a little bit small. If you want to enlarge them, this becomes a can of worms inside Illustrator that I wanted to show you how you can manage. This is obviously just a stroke, so I'm going to select it and I'm going to expand it. So I'm going to choose "Object" "Expand Appearance." Lets just zoom into this so that we can see it more clearly. We're going to have a look in the last panel. I'm just going to set my Panel Options a little bit larger so that we can see what's going on here. This is the group that we've just broken out, if you like, it's changed from a path, which is these other leaves, into this group. Inside the group are four objects. The first of these objects are the prickles that we put down using the scatter brush, and they're the ones we want to resize. Then there are the prickles around the edge of the shape. There's the expanded gradient fill here, and then there's a no fill no stroke rectangle. Now this is what you get whenever you expand a brush and all we're going to do is just trash it because that's of no use or ornament at all. But we want to look at these little shapes in here. The problem with trying to select and size these shapes is this. I've got my group selected here, when I choose "Object" "Transform" "Scale" and try to increase the scale, you can see that it's taking the group and scaling it. What we really want is the individual objects to be scaled. So I'm just going to cancel out of there. Now you might also think that you could use "Object" "Transform" "Transform Each." But this has the exact same issue. Again, it's seeing this is a group of objects and it's trying to expand them, so we can't get to expand or increase the size of these objects individually. I'm just going to cancel out of here. Now pretty much any tool you use, including the Group Selection Tool and the Lasso Tool, is going to encounter the exact same problem. If you select all of those shapes, they're just not going to be able to be transformed easily, individually. This is the solution. We're going to select on this group of objects and we're going to break them out of the group. So we're going to choose "Object" "Ungroup." We only have to do that once, although we could do it multiple times and get rid of the little boxes, the little no fill no stroke boxes that are around those shapes, but we don't have to. What I've done is I've just expanded out that group of objects and they're all still selected. They're the only things that are selected, are these little shapes that are the prickles in the middle of this leaf. Now let's go and choose "Object" "Transform" "Transform Each." Here we can set our transformation amounts. I'm actually going to transform these 125 percent in the vertical and horizontal direction. If I click the "Preview off" you can see that they really are resizing. So I'm going to click "OK." Now, everything is still selected, everything is resized appropriately, to neaten this up all we need to do is choose "Object" "Group." Now, that doesn't often happen in Illustrator, but it's a really big frustration when you can't actually get to the objects that you want to resize. In this case, it was really simple to just select the group, break them out of the group, just temporarily while they're still selected, you can resize them. Then you can repackage them back in the group, and it's all done pretty seamlessly. That might help you if you ever get stuck with a similar situation. I'm just going to press "Control" or "Command Zero" to zoom back out. Of course this is no longer a brush stroke, so while we could reshape these by selecting any of these lines and choosing "Options" of the selected object and then adjust them, we can't do it to this one because it has been broken out. It's no longer a brush stroke. It's actually a group of objects. But if that's not of concern to you, and if you did want to perhaps increase the size of the spikes, then that's how you would go ahead and do it. Of course, just to finish this off, we're just going to give it a very small pot. I'm just going to do a straight rectangle here. I'll fill it with orange, and I'll use another rectangle for the base of the pot. You could also go ahead and put flowers on your cactus should you wish to do so. 10. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create a cactus illustration using one or more of the techniques that you have seen in this class. Create your own set of brushes to do the cactus, and then post an image of your completed cactus in the class project area. I hope that you've learned something about Illustrator that you didn't already know in this class, and in particular, about using brushes in Illustrator. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked you, would you recommend this class to others? Please if you enjoyed the class and learned things from it, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly write in just a few words why you enjoyed this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 11. Bonus Video How to Save and Reuse Brushes: This is a bonus video for the cacti class for anybody who is concerned to know how to save these brushes so that they can use them again later on. I've got open all the cacti that I drew in this class. What I'm going to do is just choose File New and I'm just going to create a brand new document that just has nothing in it at all. I'm just going to set that up, so I'm selecting 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel image but it doesn't matter what size it is. I'm just setting RGB color mode, I will click "Create". What I'm going to do is to bring into this file one copy of everything that I used as a brush. I'm just going to grab these two because these were both brushes. I'm going to choose "Edit" "Copy" and I'm going back over here, I'm just going to choose "Edit" "Paste." Because what that does is it adds these as brushes into the brushes palette. Now we don't actually need these anymore, so I'm just going to delete them because they're already in the brushes palette. Let's go to the next cactus and these two are both brushes, so I'm going to copy them and paste them into here. I'm just using "Control +C" to copy and "Control+ V" to paste. I'm going to delete this. Now let's go to the middle cactus, which is this one that's got the watercolor brush. I'm going to just select the brush and the cactus leaf, copy those and paste them in here. They're in here now as brushes so I can delete them out of this document. These are now the brushes that I created in this class, but I want them to be available at anytime in the future. So what I'm going to do is to get rid of the brushes that I don't want. Anything that is possible to delete here I'm going to delete. You won't be able to delete basic, it'll stay, but you can select overall of this. Just click on "1+ Shift" click on the other, and press the "Delete" button. There's obviously one or more of those brushes that I can't delete here, so let's just go and see if we can delete them individually. I've now paired this down to the absolute minimum of brushes. It's just that you don't want unnecessary duplication in your file, which is why I did that just to clean everything up. Now I'm going to the panel here. I'm going to click it open. I'm going to choose Save Brush Library. An Illustrator will open up the location for my brushes to be saved. I'm just going to call this cacti. Now I've already done that once before, so I'm just going to make it cacti this time and just click "Save." Now when I go to a brand new document, let us just close this one because we don't need it any longer. I'm going to open up a brand new document. If we go to the brushes tab, which I've lost, so let's go on and get Window and brushes, you will see that the cacti brushes are not here and that is to be expected. What you need to do is open the flyout panel, choose Open Brush Library and go down to User-Defined because that's where you saved your brushes. Here is the cacti brush set that I just saved so I'm going to click on it, and here it is, open in Illustrator. Now, I can create a line and then just apply one of these brushes to it and it's going to be added to the brushes panel here or I can go and select all of these brushes and just drag and drop them into this panel. Now, I don't need that cacti brush set any longer because all the brushes are in the panel for this particular document. Of course, if I create a brand new document, I'm going to have to open up the brushes collection and add it to the brand new document. That's how you get access to not only your own brushes in Illustrator, but in the flyout menu, if you choose Open Brush Library, you'll see that they're heaps and heaps of other brushes that you can get access to but yours are in the User-Defined section. I hope that helps you understand how you can save brushes in Illustrator and then open them up for re-use later on. 12. Extra Instructions for Illustrator CS4 and earlier: This is a brief add-on video for anybody who's using Illustrator CS4 or earlier. The problem with the last piece of cactus, that we make the last cactus brush, is that just expanding the gradient-filled shape isn't going to work in those earlier versions of Illustrator. What I've got here is my shape with the brush around the edge. That's this piece here. I've got a scatter brush in the middle and then I have this gradient-filled path here. That's the one that's going to cause us problems. I'm going to select this gradient-filled path and as I suggested in the video, you'll choose Object and then Expand. You're going to expand the fill. We'll specify 255 shapes or 255 objects and click "Okay." Now if I have a look at the group here, that is this expanded object. You'll see we've got a clipping path, and I'm just going to delete that because I want to show you what the problem is. In the other versions of Illustrator, what we get is a whole series of oval shapes that are different colors that make up this leaf. But in Illustrator CS4 and earlier, when we expand the shape, we're not getting cropped shapes, we're just getting a series of rectangles and there are some other shapes in here that go to make up that gradient. Because they had a clipping group, they look like they're cropped but they're not. I'm just going to press undo, control, or Command Z, to put that clipping path back in. The problem with this, of course, is if I go and select this and try and make a new art brush from it, I'm not going to be allowed to do so, because it contains an element that can't be used in an art brush. In this case, the element is the clipping path. I'm going to select just this group here. Then I'm going to the Pathfinder palette, and I'm going to click here on "Crop." What that does is it uses the top-most element, which was that clipping path, to crop away all the other shapes. We're left with a series of compound shapes which are all being cropped to this leaf shape. Now because we've got a series of cropped shapes, we can create our brush. I'm going to now select all of these shapes that go to make up the leaf, and I'm going to click on the new brush link here. I'm going to create a new art brush. Here is my art brush. Just going to click "Okay" and then click away from the original shape and let's test it. I have the Brush Tool selected here. I've got my leaf shape. I'm just going to drag to create these leaves. If you're having problems in Illustrator CS4 or earlier, all you have to do is go to that one step further and use the clipping path to crop the expanded shapes to size, so that you can go ahead and create your art brush.