Creating Custom Brushes with Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction Custom Brushes: Adobe Illustrator has a robust brush energy that is often not properly utilized by graphic designers and illustrators. I'm Martin. I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC. These needs, google, ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamlined hands-on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step-by-step and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along in case you prefer not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided. Create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. We will learn the ins and outs of creating custom brushes and even how to combine them. The three main brush categories we will be focusing on our scatter art and pattern brushes. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design, illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and a desktop or laptop computer. But now it's time to start creating. So I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Custom brushes workflow start: I'm going to start with a blank new document. And the first thing that I normally do is to clear out my swatches and brushes. We don't need any templates or presets. So what you can do is from the brushes panel, you can choose select unused from the panel menu and then delete. Yes, That clears out everything and just keeps these two basic brushes. Then let's do the same with the swatches as well. We go to the panel menu and choose, select unused, and then delete everything from there as well. Once again, it only keeps the white and black colors. Now notice that I already have a few swatches saved into a CC library. So these are the colors I'm going to use. And what I can do is to select all of them, right-click and choose add color to swatches. So this will add them all here. If you want to use the same exact colors, you can find the link to the CC library in the description below. So now that we have everything ready, Let's draw a rectangle. I'm just using the rectangle tool and draw a nice rectangle, something like this. I'm going to change its colors. So first of all, I'm going to get rid of the stroke. I'm going to use this brighter green color for the fill. Now, I'm going to click and drag on the corner widgets and create a rounded corner on both. The top and the bottom is going to limit itself so you won't be able to go beyond the certain size. So that's like the maximum radius that you can use. Now next, let's draw a vertical line. I'm going to use the pen tool and I'm going to click here on the top and hold down the Shift key and click at the bottom. Now for this one, I'm going to use simply a stroke. So I'm going to press Shift X to swap the fill color to a stroke color. And I'm going to use the appearance panel and just quickly change that to the darker green value. I will also increase the point size until it becomes a bit more bulky this line, and I will also click on the Stroke panel option here and set the cap to round. So that's going to keep these end points more rounded. So now that we have this first line, I'm going to duplicate it a couple of times with the Selection Tool. Hold down the Alt or Option key and click and drag it to the side. You can also hold down the Shift key to keep it straight and then press Command or Control D a couple of times. I think we'll need for duplicates here. And then now I can drag them a little bit closer to the actual shape itself and then move the one on the left all the way to the edge of our rectangle. Then the other one also to the right edge. Now select all of these and then choose from here the Horizontal Distribute Center. Once I click on that, that's going to even them out. And we don't actually need these ones on the sides. I only use them just to be able to create this perfect quarters within the rectangle shape. Now, what we need to do is to add a bit of life to this illustration because otherwise it would be very geometric and boring. So what I'm going to do first of all, is to draw a rectangle once again. And I will use this as a guide. So I am going to set it up around here. And notice that I'm using the space bar to position the rectangle while I'm drawing it. So whenever you are holding down the space bar by drawing any shapes, you can still move it around before you let go the mouse. And I'm going to separate this drawing into three sections, the top, the center, and the bottom sections. This will be important when we are creating our pattern brush at the end. For now, I'm just going to set it up to something like this. And then once it's created, I'm going to press Command or Control F5 to turn this into a guide. When I click away, you can see it's actually not the shape anymore. It is a guide. And we can also see it here in the layers panel that this rectangle is now turned into a guide. Why is that important? Because this element, we will only use two separate our illustration and we don't want it to show anywhere. Now what we need to do is to select everything and move it to the side a bit and then duplicate it. So we have a second version. And I'm going to select all of these shapes apart from the guide and then switch to the eraser tool, that's Shift E on the keyboard. And then holding down Alt or Option key, we can delete the top section. Just keep a little bit of section here around the guide. And I'm going to do the same thing from below. Again, holding down Alt or Option key, I'm going to delete from this shape. Now we can delete the guide from here, zooming closer. I'm going to also make sure that these lines, so these three lines don't actually use the cap feature. So going back to the stroke settings, I'm going to set them back to Butt Cap. That's the option. And I'm going to also make sure that they are extended all the way to the edge. So on the top and on the bottom. Okay, So now that we have it ready, let's select all of these elements in group it together, Command or Control G, and then drag it back here on top of our original shape. So make sure it's nicely aligned so you shouldn't be able to see where it is because it's exactly the same values. And I'm going to select it and copy it down also to the bottom. I'm going to drag it down all the way where that guide is. So once you have these in place, they should be on top of your actual illustration here in the layers panel, I can see that both of them are on top of everything else. I am also going to lock these, so I will use the lock icon, so I won't be able to select them and I won't be able to mess them up so they will stay where they are. Now, these we will use to make sure that our illustration is kept at the exact same position on these critical edges. This is again very important for creating later on the pattern brush, because if you alter anything around these details is going to show up as little shifts in your pattern brushes which doesn't look good. So this is very important step. Of course you can skip it and you can work around it. But I found this technique to be quite useful. So we have these little details app that we've logged as a security measure. 3. Distortion, Warp Tool: Now let's move on and select everything in the background. And we're going to add a bit of life to this illustration because it looks a bit too flat and geometric at the moment. So I'm going to use the warp tool for this, That's Shift R on the keyboard. And with this, we can start painting over details and distorted. Now notice that if I use this tool around that detail that ve logged, that will always tell me whether I am creating distortions to close to that secure line or not. So that's the reason why we have it there. But what I'm going to do is to be more subtle and use a bigger brush with this tool. The way you can change the brush size is by holding down Alt or Option and Shift key together. With that, you can very quickly change the brush size and then quickly add a little bit of distortion up here. And also below. Once again, I'm, I'm avoiding going close to the guides. We can check always. Once I deselect this, whether we went to close or not. So I'm going to do a bit of distortion here as well at the bottom. Something like that. Maybe these lines can be distorted in the middle. And now I can click away and have a look at those edges. I think they look good. Maybe apart from this one here, this was shifted slightly. So what I can do here is to select that line and then use the direct selection tool. Select the point that is close to that detail. Maybe zoom a little bit even closer and make sure our align it so it has a nice continuous line that we can always go back and make further adjustments with individual details as well. If I don't like the way this line bends here, I can select it with the Direct Selection Tool or the path selection tool, and then use the warp tool again, change the brush size if needed. And then notice that now it's only going to affect that line without distorting any other details. So it's almost like isolating it from the rest of the objects by making that selection first. Now, what I'm going to do is to also make it a little bit of adjustment on the main shape just to have a bit more interesting and detail here, something like that. And then I am going to refine these lines because I would like to create a nice top and bottom detail for the cacti or the cactus details. So I'm going to select this line here first and use the eraser tool, Shift E, delete the bit that I don't need. And then using the direct selection tool, I can drag these points into position to create a nice little bending line here. I'm going to delete from this other line as well that I can just keep it straight. And for this one, I'll delete what I don't need. And then the last point here, again, I can just bend it with the direct selection tool, like so. To save time, you can do this even faster. Just use the direct selection tool and select the top edges of your lines, delete them, and then use the direct selection tool to drag them into the position that you need them. So this one again can be bent a bit. This one can be dragged down. And then this one again, select the top point of this path, drag it in there, and then add a little curve here and a little curve there. So if I'm still not happy with the way it curves, I can still use the warp tool. Just move it around until it fits. Now, let's take a look at this from a distance and I think it looks fine. And now what we can do is to get rid of these locked objects. So I'm going to actually delete one of them, maybe the one at the bottom. And I'm going to move this other one here to the side and also rotate it 90 degrees. So holding down Shift key, just drag it until it is flat like horizontal. This is the way we will need it for the pattern brush. So we just keep that on the side. But now we have everything here ready for the base of the cacti brush. 4. Creating Spikes, Scatter Brush: Now it's time to create a scatter brush for these spikes or spines. So for this, I'm going to use the default calligraphic brush. I just selected that circle there, and I'm going to use this third color, this bright yellow color, and I'm going to paint 123. So this will be a spike detail or spine detail, and I will select it and group it together. Now I'm going to make this smaller because at the moment it's too big compared to the cactus. But before I do so, I wanted to mention that under the transform panel, you have to check whether you have the scale, strokes and effects option on or not, then it's turned on. That means when you are scaling something, it's also going to scale the stroke sizes. And that's actually good for us. So that's what I need it here. So I kept it enabled. So remember that option is there. So I'm going to set it up to something around this size. Let's just see how it looks. I'm going to place it here. Yeah, that looks quite nice. And I am going to drag this group, the spine or spike into the brushes panel. So this is going to be our first custom brush, and this will be saved as a scatter brush. So let's click on Okay. Now the scatter brush settings will come up, but we will come back to this later. For now, I'm just going to click on, Okay. Alright, now this is a little detail we can put to the side. We don't actually need it anymore, but it's good to keep it there. And notice that we have the scatter brush already here. Now we can double-click on this to rename it, I will just call it spikes and then switch to the brush tool by pressing B on the keyboard. And if I drew a line, Let's just draw a vertical line here. It's already adding these little details. But what we need to do is to go into the settings by double-clicking on the brush icon. And here we will add a bit of life again to the design. So we need to randomize all of these values, the size, spacing, scatter and rotation. So what we do first is to set them all to random. And then we can adjust these values. Essentially, you can set up a tolerance for all of these attributes and minimum and maximum randomization value. So if for example, the size is set to a 100100 on both sides, that means it's still limited, so we don't allow any size changes. But once I start changing the size and I'm normally use the shift up and down arrows to increase, decrease these values when they are selected. You can see if I said the size maybe 250 per cent, then it can already vary the size between the original size, which is a 100 per cent, that's the maximum value. And 50 per cent, which is half the size. If I want to go beyond the original size, I can even increase this beyond 100 per cent, and then we get much larger sizes as well. So the scale or threshold is already much of either than originally, but I'm actually going to keep it below a 100%, maybe 90% for the maximum size and for the minimum size, I will keep it around 70%. So I don't want too big of a difference between these details. And I'm going to do is the same for all the other attributes for spacing again, maybe between 9040%, yeah, something like that. You can see that again randomizes the distance between each of these elements. Then for scatter, I'm going to use minus ten and then ten per cent. That's, again, you can see will shift things around left and right, a bit of randomization there, and then rotation again minus ten and positive ten. So we can check before and after that was without using these random values. And this is how it looks with all of these randomization. Now let's click Okay, and then click on Apply to Strokes. So it's going to keep applying these changes to the existing brush lines. And what you can do now is to use the brush tool again with the same brush and just draw another line here on the left and one more here on the right. Something like that. Now, if you find that your lines are not perfect, you can have one of the line selected and double-click on the brush tool from the toolbar. So that's once again here on the left. Make sure you have the edit selected paths turned on and also keep selected. This way. When you are painting over a line, you can make adjustments to it. And it's going to allow you to even continue drawing details like this. But all I wanted is to refine the line a little bit and then maybe select this other one. Also just drag it down a bit further and also just continue it up here. So extend those lines. And that looks quite good, but I feel like the spikes are spines are a little bit too big. So I will deselect everything and double-click on this little detail here. Let's just reduce the size further. So the maximum size I'm going to set to 70 and minimum to 50. Yeah, I think that looks better. Let's click Okay. And also apply to strokes. 5. Flower detail, Art brush: Now next what we need to make sure is we keep the areas around the guide free of any spike details. And the way we can do that is by zooming in a little bit closer and just simply adjusting these lines. We can even use the good old Warp tool and just move things around a bit. Let's say something like that. Okay, That line is fine. So it's not going over the guideline. Let's select this other one as well. I will use the warp tool, move it around a bit and if it's not going, but I wanted it, I can always select the whole path and just simply use the up and down arrows and shifted down a bit. I just noticed that there is also an overlap here. I'm going to delete a bit from that line until again is not overlapping the guide. Yeah, that looks good. Let's go down here as well. Left and right is fine. Just the central part needs to be adjusted slightly. So I'm going to maybe delete this bottom section here, couple of points from it and then drag this one down. Just simply using the direct selection tool, adjusting these anchor points. And maybe we can even divide this path to make sure that there is a gap around the guide. And the way you do that is simply select an anchor point close to the guide and then press Backspace or Delete. Now, I have two separate parts, and they all inherited the attributes of the original brush. So I can now refine the two end points. Make sure that that again, is an empty space around the guide. Now if I zoom out, I can have a good look at this and I think it works quite nicely. So we already used our scatter brush for the spikes, but now we will create an art brush. Before doing that though, we need a flower on the top just to create a nice little detail there. So for this, I'm going to again very quickly draw something using the Ellipse tool. I'll just draw an ellipse and I will set the fill color for this to be this bright pink color. Then I will duplicate this and select both of the ellipses. And then use the shape builder tool to delete the excess details that we don't need. Hold down Alt or Option key to delete the left and the right sides. So there we have a nice little leaf detail. Now, we can select this and I'll zoom a little bit closer. You can see what I'm going to do. Select this and maybe just rotate it to its left, something like that. And then press R on the keyboard. Place that little center point here on this anchor point, and hold down the Alt or Option key, click and drag to duplicate it. Let's say something like that. And then press Control or Command D a couple of times to create additional duplicates. Then select every second shape and change the fill color to this other color. And there you go. There is a nice little flower created. We can select all of this together, group it, control or command G, and then reduce the size and fit it here on the top of our cactus. How lovely is that? Now let's select everything apart from the guide and the way you can make sure you don't select the guide itself is either that you look it from here in the layers panel, or you can also selectively say from the view menu to look or guides, I'm going to use this because it's probably easier. And then select everything here. Also, don't forget to select that little section at the bottom because we divided it. And now everything is selected. We can drag the whole thing into the brushes panel. This time, we will set this up as an art brush and then click Okay. Now once again we have loads of settings here. The only thing I'm going to change is the size, which I will set to maybe 50 per cent or 40 per cent even. And then click Okay. Now we can see that these brushes created and we can access it from here. I'm going to select the brush tool by pressing V on the keyboard and also making sure I selected this new brush. And now all we have to do is to start painting our cacti. So this is already looking really nice. The only thing I notice is that whenever I drew something too long or too short, it gets distorted. So on the left side, these are very similar to the size or the scale of the original detail that we saved as a brush by these other ones, they get distorted. Now, you can refine these by going back to the settings of the brush by double-clicking on it here on the right. And you can decide whether these other options will improve the result or not. Having the preview on, I can click on scale proportionately or stretch between guides and then maybe adjust this setting here so the flower, for example, is not going to be distorted and the bottom part will also not be distorted. But I feel like it's still not going to help much. So let's just see once again, it certainly removes the distortion from those top and bottom parts. So we can see the details are not distorted, but still the center section is very distorted. Both on the smaller size brush strokes and also on the longer brushstrokes. So again, we could see that the art brushes cool, but it is limited as long as your brushstrokes are very similar in length is going to work nicely. But if you want to draw brushstrokes with different length, then you will need a pattern brush. And I'm going to show you in the next part. 6. Custom Pattern Brush Preparation: You might remember or recall that we created these details with an art brush and we decided that it works well if we create similar length brush lines, but when we are drawing longer or shorter details, it gets distorted. So this doesn't look good, and also this doesn't look good. So let's resolve this by going back to the original details and prepare them for a custom pattern brush. This brush type is probably the most complex one and it takes the longest time to set up properly. But believe me, doing this really pays off and it's worth the extra time and effort. So the first thing that we need to do is to select all the little details that we created last time, the scatter brush, and make sure that they are expanded. The reason for that is because we will need to rotate all of the details soon. And if I rotate these lines, notice that their orientation is not changing, so they are still pointing upwards. So what we need to do is to expand their appearance from the Object menu, Object Expand Appearance. And now when I'm rotating them, they are going to follow the changes. So that's great. But what we also need to do is to select this guide. Now if it's locked from last time, you might remember, you can unlock it from this menu. But what we need to do is to also release this guide because we will have to also rotated. And guides can be transformed or scaled and move around, but they cannot be rotated. So for this technique that we need to do next, we also need to use this shortcut Command, Option five, or control or five. And that will turn the guide back into a normal shape. So that's all we needed to do. And now we can select everything and I will make it a little bit smaller while holding down Shift key and just drag it down. And then let's rotate it again, holding down the Shift key, making sure it goes into a horizontal perfectly like this. Let's put this here on the top and then duplicate it twice. Alt or Option key with the selection tool, drag it down once and then one more time here at the bottom. So we will be creating three separate section, the bottom, the center, and the top part of the cactus to keep it easy, the detail on the top I will use for the top section of the cacti. So I will select this rectangle and drag the left edge of it over to the right side. So it's almost like flipping the rectangle without affecting the original line that we had there. That's very important because that will need to be aligned to the central segment. I will do the same thing here at the bottom. Select again the rectangle, and then drag it onto the left. Now to simplify things, I'm going to also make sure that these rectangles don't have much gap on the edges. So I just drag these rectangles a little bit closer. They don't have to align perfectly. Just make sure that you don't have much empty space there. And now that we have these ready, we have to also make sure that these rectangles are on top of everything else in our layer structure. The way we can do that quickly is by selecting them, holding down the Shift key, I can select all three of them and then right-click arrange, bring to front or use the shortcut Command Shift square bracket or Control Shift square bracket. And that will put them here on top of the layer structure. Now, we can select these details here on the top. So making sure that both the rectangle and all the illustration details behind it are selected. And then use Command or Control a seven to turn it into a clipping mask. Let's do the same thing here in the middle. Let's select this command or Control seven. And then once again, Command or Control seven here at the bottom. So now we have these three separate sections ready, the top, the center, and the bottom parts of the cactus. But before we go any further for the top section, I will create a version where there's no flour. So I will just simply select this group all to click and drag or Option click and drag to duplicate, and then double-click to get into it, and then delete the flower with the backspace or delete, then double-click outside to exit the isolation mode. 7. Custom Pattern Brush: Now technically we have everything ready to create our pattern brush, but still we have one more thing to do and that is to eliminate the clipping masks. The problem with clipping masks in the pattern brushes that they leave huge gaps between the sections. So when it's supposed to repeat nicely, there will be big gaps that you can't really remove. So to avoid this happening, what you need to do is to select one of these sections. I'm going to start with this one in the middle and go up to the Object menu and choose Expand as a first step. And then click OK in the expand menu. But then you also need the Pathfinder panel and click on the crop option. That way is going to get rid of everything that was originally inside the clipping mask and it will only preserve the details that were visible. So notice how the selection or the bounding box changed. Let's see this a couple of more times just so you remember what to do. So I select this other one, go up to expand and then, okay, and then crop from Pathfinder. We have to do this two more times. So Object Expand, okay, crop. And then once again, Object Expand, okay, crop. Now we have everything ready for the pattern brush. So let's start with the center part with this selected. I can just simply drop it into the brushes panel and choose Pattern Brush, and then the dialog box comes up. You can see why I started with the center part because by default that's what's added to the brush first. So these five lethal swatches here are called the tiles, and they each are dedicated to certain parts of your pattern brush. The first one is for the outer corner. The second one is the site title it's called but I call it the center part. And then there is one for the inner corner tile, but we won't be bothering with that. What's more important is the start N tile. So we will set up the Start Tile for the bottom part of the cactus and the anti will be the top with the flower. The only setting that I'm going to change here at this point is the scale which I will set to probably, let's say 40 per cent. We can always come back and make changes to this. And then I'm going to click on, Okay, notice that we can already see these tiles here in the brush panel. But what we need to do now is to select the bottom part of the cactus and start dragging it over the brush panel. But then hold down the Alt or Option key with which we can target specific type that we need, which is this one here, this is the Start Tile. The one on the right is the end. This is the star tile. So let's just hold down the Alt or Option key and let go the mouse that's going to add that detail that then we can click. Okay, and then let's do the same thing with the top. I'm going to do first the one with the flower. So I'm going to hold down the Alt key while I'm targeting this last tile, which is the n tile, and you will see it updating here in the dialog box as well. So the tile shows a preview of what you just added. Let's just click. Okay. And now we are actually ready to test this out. So let's move here in this empty artboard. Select the brush tool by pressing V on the keyboard, making sure that this new pattern brush is selected. And then let's draw a line. So I start from the bottom and go up. Let's draw another one. And then let's draw one more and maybe move this a little bit closer. And then you go, we have perfect continuous details without anything being stretched. 8. Creating variations for the Pattern Brush: The only thing now is that you might want to create a few stems without flowers on them. For this, we will go into the brushes panel and from the drop-down menu, we choose duplicate brush. And on this new version we are going to replace the top by using this other variant. So once again, drag over, hold down the Alt key and replace that detail. So that's how easily you can update any segments of your brushes. And just to test this out, if I select an existing brush line and choose this other brush is going to immediately update to that. So we can easily switch between stem without a flower or with a flower. Now it seems like these pattern brushes work perfectly. But let me point out one weakness. What happens if I drew one that's much shorter than these other lines? So I'm going to use the brush tool, select the one with the flower. And maybe I want to have a little branch or stem coming here to the side. If I drew a short one, that will look a little bit weird. I mean, this one maybe is not that bad. But if I drew an even shorter one, it still gets distorted. But if I draw a medium length, it can get even worse. So once again, you can see the stretching going on here. So what happened here? The problem is that we have a very long center part, which is great for these long details, but it's not going to work as well for these short-term or medium length lines. For this again, we need to have a brush that will have a much shorter center tile. So if you remember in the previous episode, we set up this very narrow piece which will come in handy. Now, I'm going to move this onto the art board and make sure that it's aligned in size to these other details and it seems fine. So now what I can do is to create a duplicate for this brush for both versions. So let's select both of these brushes and choose duplicate brush. So now I will have two of each of them and select the one with the flower first. Then select the little piece here. Drag and move it over. Hold down the Alt or Option key to replace the center part, which will update that brush. But then we will have to do the same with the other duplicate brush, again, holding down Alt or Option key and target that center tile. And then click Okay. Now the successfully created the variations that we needed. For the longer details like these, we have our original two brushes, but for these medium and short lines now we have these additional brushes and let's just test it out. So I have this one selected. Click on this one, and you can see immediately how much better that looks. The same thing here. If I select that, I choose this brush, it looks already much better. But still don't forget that you can use the brush tool and paint over it. If it doesn't look right, you can stretch it out a bit or move it in a direction that is going to work better, something like that. And of course, there's plenty of refinements we could do steel with these brushes and improve the settings on them. So we've done a scatter brush and Art Brush and several pattern brushes. So have fun experimenting with these features and try it out on different objects because it doesn't always have to be a cactus. 9. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.