Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Jon Brommet up Crusoe Design Co and welcome to custom brushes and Adobe Illustrator. Brushes in Adobe Illustrator are useful for a wide variety of reasons, whether it's for logo design or branding, editorial, or web use, and of course for illustration. They can really give your artwork an authentic feel and allow you to achieve a specific style with a simple as one-click. In this class, I'm going to be going over every single setting in all five categories of brushes in Adobe Illustrator. That is calligraphic, scatter, art, bristle, and pattern. By the end of this class, you'll be an expert and know how to make or customize brushes with ease. The goal of this class is go over every single brush design, the way you feel confident and inspired to create your very own brushes or customize existing brushes to your liking. If you'd like to know more about me, I'm a graphic designer and illustrator and I worked on a wide variety of design work over the past 13 years professionally. I now specialize in logo design and branding, as well as merchandise design. I've worked with bands like Blink-182, brands like [inaudible] Mark in RPM Training CO. I've collaborated with great companies like New Era to produce my own merchandise. I'm also a long-time Skillshare top teacher and I've taught nearly 75,000 students and they've watched over 2 million minutes of my content. But enough about me, this class is going to be useful for a wide variety of skill levels. You just have to at least have the basic knowledge of how to use Adobe Illustrator. If this class sounds interesting to you, keep watching and we'll get started.
2. The Brush Panel: Welcome to the class. To start with we're going to go over the different types of brushes, and then of course we're going to break down every single one, show some examples of how you could use them. Try and get you inspired to create your very own brushes. Then demystify all the strange little settings so that you can confidently make your very own brushes from scratch or edit other people's brushes and actually know what you're doing and what all these weird little settings mean. To start with, we've got the main five types of brushes. That is calligraphic, scatter, art, bristle, and pattern. Each one of these is going to be used for a fairly different types of artwork, but they can also be interchanged for illustration or typography for different purposes, so it's all going to depend on your tastes and what you're inspired to actually create. Of course later I'm going to actually break down examples of every single one of these five types of brushes. Of course, to get started in the class, you're going to want to make sure that you actually have your brush panel open. I have a docked over here on the right-hand side in this tab but if you don't see it, you just want to go to Window, head down to brushes and click that, otherwise it is F5 and it should open your brush panel. Now you may have some random assortment of brushes here the more than what I'm showing, if you do, just select them, select all of them by holding Shift and clicking the last one, and then you'll be able to hit "Delete" and they'll delete. But these last two brushes will always stay, you can't delete them unfortunately. Now that your brush panel should look exactly like mine, let's go over the basics of actually how to use the brush panel before we dive into how to actually create individual brushes. Probably most of you have actually played around in this and maybe know what some of these settings are but chances are, you do not know what all them are, and so we're going to try and break down every single thing so you know exactly what you're doing. Of course, you can always just click this arrow that'll hide it and if you go over here, we have this hamburger menu. They call it the three bars. This is going to give you a bunch of different options. Some are going to be grayed out depending on what you have selected or what you do not have selected. Of course, this is one way to create a new brush so you can click that and it will start you with one of the five options. We'll get into all of these at some point as well. We'll just click "Cancel" for now. The next option would be of course to duplicate a brush, so if you have a brush selected, you can go over and you hit "Duplicate." You're going to need to actually have a non-standard brush in order for it to be available, otherwise, you'll see that I cannot be done. Again, these two brushes here cannot be deleted. Remove brush strokes is useful once you actually have created some artwork that actually is using one of the brushes but you want to remove that effect. That's when you would click that. Select "All Unused" is going to grab your paths that do not have a stroke. That's an easy way to apply strokes. A bunch of different paths that don't have it. Then if you had a whole wide variety of brushes in here, that's where these check-marks you're going to be able to turn on and off whichever different types of brushes you want to be able to see. Right now I have it in list view, that's my preference, but you can of course, always click thumbnail V02. That's another way to view the brushes. Whatever you're more comfortable with, then you're going to have options of selected object and brush options. We'll get into those later when we'll have one selected. Then the last two things are going to be Save Brush Library and Open Brush Library. If you were to have your very own custom brush library that you want to be able to use over and over, that's where you would save it. We're going to go over to this late in the class. Or you can go to Open Brush Library and you can actually open some of the pre-made brush libraries that come with Adobe Illustrator. A lot of these options that are in this hamburger menu are also available down here. This is the delete brush, this is the new brush. This is an option of selected object and remove brush stroke. It's just nice to have them here. It just saves you a click. Then you have the library's panel, which is going to open up your libraries in case you have any brushes that are in here that you can use. Then, of course, we have the libraries, same idea. We can save our own brush libraries or we can go to some of these standard ones that actually come in. Generally, once you save a brush set, you're going to have it available under the user-defined so that you can more quickly open it. You don't have to navigate to it by clicking other library every single time. One thing that can be a bit confusing if you haven't played around with brushes before, is that if you go into a brush set, let's just say you want to use, it doesn't really matter. We'll go to the arrows and we'll select this brush panel. It's now open up this brush set in its own little tab. You can see here you can drag this tab in here if you'd like to, or you can leave it undocked over here. It doesn't matter. But this is the document's brush panel and this is just the brush set that you've opened. What happens is if you choose, so we'll just make a line here for example and let's choose one of these brushes. It's using the colors that I have selected. Now you'll see what happens is this brush will now open up into my documents brush panel. Now, if I were to close this and I were to actually save this document like I have here, then when I reopen it, what will happen is this brush will still be available because it's in use within the document. That's good to note that this is the brush panel that is linked to your actual document and what you have used in your document while making the file. That means, say you like this arrow 2.01, if you open up a new document, it will not be there unless you create a custom brush set. Another option that can be quite useful is if you end up, say using arrows, a whole bunch of, if we go to standard here, little bit of a hit and panel is if you hit the hamburger here, you can see an add to brushes. You can click all these different things also then we're going to be the same. But if you actually click persistent, and now what I would probably do is drag this somewhere where you want to be able to open it again. Now next time you open Adobe Illustrator because you have persistent checked, this will also be open, so it'll be available to you with a click of a button. It'll be really easy to get to. You won't have to open the custom brush thing every time. Having that persistent button checked is very useful. It's a great way to get to things that you want to be able to use over and over in all types of new documents. Now that you have the basic idea of the different types of brushes, but of course, I'm going to show what they are, then you've got the idea of how to actually use the brush panel pretty straightforward. Now we'll dive into each type of brush set and how to make them and get you trying to be a little more creative. Let's move on to calligraphic brushes.
3. Class Project: [MUSIC] Now it's time to talk about the class project. It's very straightforward in this class. All I want you to do is show me a brush that you created after watching this class, only one, but you can show me more if you made it, and even better if you want to go that extra mile, show me your brush in use on some artwork. It can be topography, illustration, any kind of art that you've created. It'd be really cool to see how you actually plan to use your brushes and what you found the most interesting or just related to you the best in this class. That's how easy this class project is. I'd love to see what brushes you create. Let's keep moving on.
4. Calligraphic Brushes: [MUSIC] Now it's time to show off calligraphic brushes. These can be used for, of course, calligraphy, that's probably what you're thinking of or illustration. It can basically be used for any type of document that you're creating, any design you're creating. They are a bit more dimensional than just sticking to calligraphy, that's why I've shown you some examples here of some illustrations because they can add a lot of life to your illustrations, but of course, they're great for calligraphy. The idea with the calligraphic brush is like as if you were drawing with a traditional pen nib. As you go up, the stroke goes thin, and as you come down the stroke is thick. But of course you can actually change the angle and direction of it in the calligraphy settings. Of course, this is a great example of what it might look like with some different settings and different brushes set up for this uppercase F, and some ideas of how it might look on some actual illustration work that you've created. I've got the brush panel open here and you can see that I've got a few that I've actually started to create. Again, to make your own calligraphic brush all you have to do is hit the New Brush button right there, click Calligraphic Brush and select Okay. Now these are your settings, they're not very overwhelming thankfully, there's not a ton of options, although you can get a lot of great variety in your brushes. But this is a nice, easy panel to start off with because it's not too overwhelming. You can name this whatever you want, I'll just name it Test 2 because I already had a Test 1 up there. You'll see once you've added a name to your brush, that you want to be able to play around with some of these settings. This is showing you essentially what your brush shape is going to look like and what a couple of instances of that brush will look like over here. If we play around with this angle, you see there's a directional arrow that's showing you the main area that it's going to be pointing towards, and then we're going to be able to play with the roundness, so it's going to squish two of those points. In order to get the angle that you want, what you're going to want to do is play around with the roundness and then change the angle so that shape is thick where you want it to be and thin where you want it to be. Then the last thing you're going to be able to change is the actual size of the brush. A lot of the times you're not going to want to go too crazy because you can actually change this in the stroke settings, but it's good to have a good normal base size to start with. Of course, all of these you can be played with later on. Each one of these has the exact same settings here, if we click this button that says Fixed. You're also going to have the option of random, pressure, stylus wheel, tilt, bearing, and rotation. Now in this class I'm actually not going to go over pressure, stylus, tilt, bearing, and rotation, and the reason why I'm not going to go over any of those, those are all specific to a graphic tablet like a Wacom tablet or some other third party tablet. The settings actually all work the exact same, so it would be redundant. The only difference is that the settings are actually going to be reactive to using your tablet rather than just to the settings here that we have or the randomized settings. You'll basically be able to use them the exact same, they're just going to respond to your pen and stylus a little differently. Fixed is pretty straight forward, that means that it's going to be exactly like that every time you use it, very straightforward. Another option you have is to choose random, and once you choose random, that angle, in this case, because I've decided to random, it will start to vary and you can change how much it varies. As you can see here in these examples, one variance will be just normal, like you set it at minus four, and as we crank this up, we're going to have all different variety. If you crank it all the way, it may look the same as at zero, but really what it's going to do is it's going to give you the most amount of variety between that minus four that it can find, so it's going to put them all over the place. Again, the same idea with roundness and the same idea with size, you can completely add crazy variety and you can get an idea of what they're going to look like over here. The best way to truly get a good idea is to click Okay. Now that we have that here, I'm going to select one of my pieces of artwork, I'll select this big one here. I've created Test 1, if you'd like to see those settings, just double-click it, and those are the settings that I have set up for this exact calligraphic brush which I've shown here. We'll just click Okay for a moment, and now we'll go back to that brush that we were just creating and as you can see here, you're getting a live look at how that looks. Now one thing that can be annoying is because, I'm just going to click Cancel for moment, as you can see that there's all these blue lines, these are my stroke lines if we go into wireframe here of my actual artwork, and this can be distracting when you're trying to look at a brush.. You may want to go down to View, and then actually click Hide Edges, and now you'll actually be able to see your artwork without the distractions. I also have Smart Guides on which is why it's highlighting things so I can hit Command U or Control U on a PC to turn those off. Now it's really easy to focus on the artwork. We're going to double-click this again, and you can see because I have them set to random, every time I click this brush is completely randomly changing the design. Of course, this is pretty extreme, it isn't looking a little bit ugly, but that is the whole purpose of random, as you're going to get completely varied range for each of these settings. A lot of the times when I'm creating this, I would probably want to play around with fixed rather than random because random can be very extreme. But this is a great way to play around and actually see what your artwork is going to look like live, and a lot of the times to get the most variants, you want to have that roundness down and that's really going to give it that calligraphy style look as if you were using that brush and that nib. Then you can just play around with sizes and all the different things that are going to make it your artwork quite varied. But once again, so once you click Okay it's going to give you the option and soon to tell you that this pressure is actually in use. You have the options of leaving the strokes as they were before or applying this new set to all of your brushes. Generally speaking, you're going to want to click Apply to Strokes so that all of the strokes that are using that brush will now be updated to the newest brush settings. Another great thing is if you have your artwork de-selected, as you can see here, that means that if I go in here, I didn't even have to have my artwork selected, I can still make changes, and they're going to live change the actual, all the instances of using that brush in my document. It's a really easy way if I have a whole bunch of different types of artwork, I can change them all on the fly, it's very convenient that way. Now just to show you some more examples here, I have some extra documents, I'll just close this for a moment. You do not have to go insane when you're using any brush. In fact, most of the time you're going to want to be very subtle. I'm showing you extreme example so you can really see what they do. A lot of times it just little subtle changes are enough to make your artwork look unique, whatever it is you're creating. As you can see here, I've created this Test 1 brush, and the settings are not all that extreme, but they're adding just enough variety into my artwork to give it a little bit of a more different style, a little more flavor to the actual design. This is an example of using that [inaudible] design that I had with none on the brushes, so I've removed all of these different effects. My Test 1, my random variation, and my fixed dramatic brush, these are all just brushes I created off-camera just to give you the idea of what we can do with these calligraphic brushes. But it's giving you quite a different art style and quite a different effect, and the cool thing about this is you're not having a hand to draw everything. I created all these shapes using things like the Pen Tool and rectangle tool, and circular tool, all these fun things, and it's really easy to create it and now it looks very unique and varied in line way. Another thing to consider, as I was mentioning, that adding these brushes can give your artwork just a little bit more of a handmade vibe or a hand-drawn aesthetic. This is an example of what it looks like playing just a monoline stroke, and this is what it looks like adding one of these calligraphic brushes, in this case, my test brush, which I've shown you before. But another thing that you can start to consider to do if you really want to try and get that line right is you can see there's the shake and wiggle. What I've done here is I've simply just gone in and I've added a roughened filter. You go to Effects, Distort and Transform, and you click Roughen. In this case in my appearance panel I'll double-click it, and with these settings combined with the calligraphic brush I created, now suddenly this artwork that I created all on my computer, all using the trackpad is suddenly looking a lot more handmade and it's looking a lot more authentic, and I think it looks way cooler. One thing to keep in mind is that when you do add brushes on top of your artwork, sometimes it will actually start to affect the masks. You'll have to go in there and manually make some changes to clean everything up, and that's why this had that extra funny circle in there adding to my sun and it looked all right. But that's the reason why sometimes it'll add that stroke to your mask, which is not ideal. You just need to go in and clean that up, and it's a good way to make sure that you don't have any errors to start with in any hidden objects in their artwork. As mentioned, of course, calligraphy is a very obvious use of using the calligraphic brush. On that first slide, those different types of Fs, it's a great way to actually make your drawing again, whether you're using a tablet or whether you're just using the Pen Tool or a trackpad, you can actually get your artwork to look very varied as if you drew it by hand with that pen and nib. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll find a font that I really like, in this case, this Portrait script font, and I notice all it's very consistent thickness, it's maybe not as varied as I want for whatever purpose I might be using, so what I would do is just come in and I would either use the Pen Tool and just draw over this or you may be use the pencil tool, of course you can use the brush tool as well. Then I've redrawn it and I've just simply added my brush effect on top of this, and now I essentially have very same font, but I've been able to actually bury it really quickly without having to go in and adjust each thickness of each stroke manually using the width tool, and I was also able to just change up that r, so it looks a bit more like a traditional cursive r. Hopefully that gives you enough information on the calligraphic brush to get started and create your very own brushes. I'm super excited to see what you guys create. Let's move on.
5. Brush Tool Vs Pen, Blob, and Pencil: The great thing about using brushes and Adobe Illustrator, is that you can apply them to basically any object that you've created in Adobe Illustrator, whether that's a brush tool or the blob, pencil, pen, whether you've used a rectangle or ellipse. Whatever it is that you've used to create your vector artwork, you can usually add a brush on top of it. But you may wonder if you want to actually draw alive, whether it's with a stylus or just your mouse, or your trackpad. Which tool is best for the actual drawing part? Aside from using shapes, or draws can be very accurate. Now, great to use an Adobe Illustrator, is what I use most of the time and then generally I'll use the pen tool quite a bit. I like actually using the pencil tool as well and I'll show you why the brush tool can be very useful, and if the blob tool is for you. I'll break these down pretty quickly, because you may be familiar with the differences, but you may not really know how they actually interact with a brush that's live selected. The main thing here is using the brush tool, as you can see a lot of these look very similar and I actually did hand draw them each a time. There is some variants, but I was trying to do more or less the same thing. The biggest difference here with the blob brush, is the blob brush is no longer a live stroke. Although it was actually using the brush to create the artwork, it's basically outline that artwork and it is no longer an editable stroke. That can be a bit of a pain depending on what you're doing. We can get to the blob brush by hitting Shift B. Now in this example, I'm going to hit Test 2, because it's a pretty dramatic brush. Just using my trackpad, I'll click, you can see it's very thick, and it's going thin, thick, thin. But the biggest differences is as soon as I let go is now an expanded object, and you can see there is no brush selected. I can be a bit of a pain and because I like to be able to go back and change things if I need to. But depending on the type of artwork you're creating, the blob brush might be a good option. Now making sure that we select our brush again, before we start drawing, I've used the pencil tool that is N on your keyboard. As I draw, you can only see the outline of the stroke, you can't actually see your brush as you're drawing. As soon as you let go, you may notice that the brush is, or is not affected. As you can see, it didn't really show, so I have to click it again, that's a bit of a pain. Even though you can see my brush is selected, I'm drawing, I let go. It didn't affect it that I have to go in and add it again. It's a little bit of a pain. The good thing about using the pencil tool, is that it is a nice way to draw lines, and have illustrator automatically smooth them out. Of course, it depends on your settings, which you can double-click on the pencil tool and make it all the way to smooth. But that's the problem with the pencil tool, is you're having to go in and add that effect on top. The pen tool, of course, most of you will probably be very familiar with it. It's a great tool. But again, as I was clicking and dragging, you were not seeing the brush actually applied. Even though the brush is highlighted, I click and drag and as soon as I let go, the brush has gone. I'm having to add it on top. Again, just slowing it down a little bit, but is not a big deal. The main difference is, this is why there is a brush tool, and where it varies from the rest of them. If we double-click on the brush tool that's B on your keyboard, by the way, you can change how smooth it is. It's going to smooth out your lines. I generally like to have those smooth. You can have it fill any of your brushstrokes. Generally speaking, I don't want to fill it, I only want to stroke. You can keep it selected, which I don't really like, but that's a great way to allow you to edit paths. You can edit selected paths within a certain amount of pixels, which I'll show you how that works. But the great thing is now that I actually have the brush tool selected, much like the blob brush. When I'm drawing them live seen the brush effect, I'm seeing exactly what it's going to look like, and as soon as I let go, it's just smoothing it out, but they brush is still there, it's still all the effect. Unlike the blob brush, I can come in here and I can make changes. I can change my brush, and have it auto apply to these strokes. This is going to allow me the most control moving forward. It's one of the better options, especially if you're drawing by hand, maybe with a mouse or stylists, or something like that. You'll actually be able to see what it looks like as you're drawing. There's no guesswork. You're not drawing it and then seeing how it applies afterwards, it's very useful in that regard. Then another really cool thing about the brush tool, unlike something like the pen tool for example, is if I decided I didn't like the way this line finished, I can come in here, and just clicking and then let go, and you can see it's actually recreated that line. It got rid of that old version for me, and it's added this and it's changed the artwork. I haven't said so, it won't do that unless I actually select the artwork. Now that's selected, I can draw along the line and you can see that it's extending line, It's changing the artwork that I had selected as I need it to. That is all the differences between the different drawing tools and I won't need to go over them. But of course you can use any of the shape building tools as well, and they work just like the pen tool where you have to apply the brush on top of it. But that is the difference because I generally don't use the brush tool, I generally only use the pencil and pen tool. But if I'm hand drawing, and I want to be able to see the effect right away. Using the brush tool makes a lot of sense, in conjunction with actually having a custom brush.
6. Scatter Brushes: It's time to talk about creating a scatter brush. There's a lot of different things that you can create with a scatter brush, but one that I'm going to really zero in on to start with is a stipple brush. I like using a stipple brush the most for the scattered types of brushes because it's something that I actually find useful and something that I'll use a lot of the times, whereas some of the other effects are a little bit more of what I would consider gimmicky, so they're something that you're going to use really rarely, but for me, a stipple is something that's really cool. It allows you to save a ton of time, rather than drawing each little dot by hand, and it's something that I would personally use in my artwork quite a bit, and there's a lot of different ways to use it. I'll show you a little more, moving on in a moment. As you can see here, I've made a lighter stipple with a little more space in between each dot, and then a much darker stipple. There's obviously many ways to make these types of brushes, but I'm just going to show a few different ones to hopefully give you some inspiration so that you can start making them cool with scatter brushes. Another example of creating a scatter brush would be to do something like stars. What's great here is I just would take my brush and just swipe it across the screen. Now I have all of these stars that are just randomly generated. Again, what's great about brushes is that they're saving you a ton of time. I'm not manually placing all of the stars. I'm not manually shrinking them and enlarging them. I'm just doing this all with some brush settings. What would take quite awhile to create, is only taking a second or two, thanks to setting up a brush to start with. Now we'll go over how to make some scatter brushes. What I did is I just took a piece of paper from my notepad and I drew a bunch of dots on top of it. I didn't even bother using a scanner because it doesn't matter nowadays, it's just easy to snap a photo with your smartphone. It'll be totally fine. I did some other types of drawings to try later, but then all I did is crop it. Using Adobe Illustrator, you can simply click on an image, hit the "Crop Image", and then just try and get rid of all the distractions, everything you don't need. In this case, I didn't even really need any of those other bits. You can just go like that. Hit "Enter", and then now you have it cropped. I'm just going to undo that, but that's what I did here. Then from there, I simply live traced it. I clicked on this image. I went up here to Image Trace, and I have set up my very own trace. It's going to remind me that because this is a high-quality image, you can see it's 896 PPI, it takes a moment to actually run the render. We'll just click "Okay". You can see that's what it looks like. If you want to make any changes, you just hit this box up here and you can take a look. This is my custom preset for how I generally trace most of it. Then I'll just play with the threshold up and down, if I'm not happy with how that looks. That's what you end up with. Then basically what you end up having to do is just selecting this area, in this case, or this area, whatever you want. Of course, you can go in here and manually move things around. What I like about these two, is that they're not all little perfect dots. You can't do perfect dots. You could just create them straight into Adobe Illustrator. You don't need to draw by hand, but I like them being imperfect and rough looking. I think it gives it that more natural handmade aesthetic. We'll talk more about these other shapes very soon, but you could also just simply start with one single shape, and then you can use that to create a scatter brush. Here are three examples of my stipple brush that I've created. What we want to do is we want to make sure that the brushes panel is open, so go to Window, and then down to Brushes. I have mine docked here on this bar, so I can just quickly click this icon and it'll pop up. All I did here was I would grab this little grouping of dots that I created and simply drag it into the brushes panel. That will open up my new brush dialogue box and I want to make sure that I select Scatter, as you can see here. We'll go ahead and we'll click, "Okay". Now we have a bunch of different settings that we can play with. What I'm actually going to do for a moment is I'm just going to cancel out this and I'm going to open up my existing brush that I've already created by double-clicking on it. That'll open the exact same dialog box you can see here. Now as you can see, I've got everything just set to the default just for the sake of it, and I'll show you what the different settings will actually do. We're going to talk about the colorization area of this box a little later. We're just going to talk about these four settings right here to start with. Of course, you can name your brush to whatever you want. In this case, I call it Stipple Light. Now, here's where we can play with the size. Now fixed size is quite obvious. It's a single size along the entire line. As you can see up here, my brush is not getting bigger or smaller, but what we could do is we could either fix that size smaller, and we'll just turn on preview here so you can see what it would look like. We can fix that size larger, so you can see in the preview what that would look like. But a lot of the times when you're creating a scatter brush, you're going to actually want to go down and click "Random". This will allow you to customize the smallest sized ones and the largest size on the right here. If we make the smallest size a little smaller, it will make the largest size a little bigger. You can see that there's a variation now, that this one stamp is small and this other stamp is giant. For what I'm doing here, I actually don't really want that, but that can be really useful for a lot of different types of scatter brushes you are creating, like what I'll show you shortly. I'll put it back to fixed, and for now, I'll put it back to 100. The next is spacing, much like the last setting, all of these settings work the same. You've got your fixed spacing. It's the space between each stamp as I'm calling it here. We can shrink that spacing down. It really tightens it, as you can see, or we can enlarge that spacing and then it gets a really giant space between each step. Get that to whatever is comfortable, maybe 63 or something looks good. Again, another option would be to do random. You can choose it to randomize the spacing. It could go anywhere between that amount of space or this amount of space or so on. You can play around with those settings. I'm going to leave it fixed again for this sake. The next one is scatter. This one is going to be in relation to the line that you've drawn. I have a nice straight line. It's easy to follow. Now if I pull this down, let's go back to fixed here. If I crank this down and what you can see, what's going to happen is that it's actually moving the brush below the line, but if I pull it up, it's going to move it above the line and it's affecting the brush below it too because I've accidentally selected that, but regardless. That's what you're going to do with your scatter. Of course, if you go random, then you can choose it to randomly go below the line or randomly it would go above the line. We're just going to leave it at zero percent. Then we have rotation. Rotation is, of course, the angle of the stamps. Here's my reference stamp over here. You can see that by this dot that is in the same spot every time. This is going to be pretty useful for getting a bit of a different effect. Again, make sure you have preview checked on. What you want to do is just turn this up down and that'll rotate it one way, and if you put this up, it will rotate it more the other way and you have this option. Now you're seeing this dot is appearing at different angles. Now you're going to get a lot more variance. This is actually really useful, especially in a stipple brush. Again, this is totally random. Every time you draw the line, it's going to end differently. Now you may notice some other options that are grayed out, and all of these options of the very same for each of these, we have pressure, stylus wheel, tilt, bearing, and rotation. Every single one of those settings is going to be only available if you have a compatible graphics tablet, like a Wacom setup. It's all going to be related to the pressure that you push with your pen or whether you have a stylus wheel on the tablet, the tilt of your pen, the bearing of it, and of course, rotation. Those are all very significant if you're actually drawing with a graphics tablet, which is something that I just don't do anymore. I use an iPad Pro for most of my drawing. Then I'll bring it in here or I'll just create it right for the vector. The settings work the exact same. I think it's just too redundant for me to show these. I do have a tablet, I can go plug it in, but I haven't used it in, I don't even know, 10 years now. [LAUGHTER] If it still worked, if I plugged it in, it would be the exact same, it would just change based on those values that I'm using the actual pen with, but the setting changes are basically the same. The last thing here that I'm going to talk about is the rotation related to, so you can have it related to the page or the path. It's not going to look a lot different because my lines are very straight here, but basically the rotation is related to the page right now. Again, it's all random anyway. It doesn't really matter. If I didn't have it random and had it at fixed, then it would make more of a difference. Because if I put this to fixed like I said, this dot here is a period at the top at every time. I've been at minus 20, so it's a little different angle here, but still, it's in the same spot, and that's related to the page. Whereas if I related it to the path, again, it's not going to look different right now because of the path, it's just a single straight line. But if the path went the other way or some squiggly lines or something like that, it's going to be related to how the path is. This North Point won't necessarily be at the top of the page because it'll be related to the top of the path. Hopefully, that makes sense, but a lot of the times, I find you just leave this to page. Again, a lot of the times, they're going to be using random settings so I don't find it all that relevant. Colorization, we will talk about shortly when we get to one of the other brushes. One of the great things about creating brushes too, is after you've made some changes to the settings, you can simply apply to strokes which will apply to all of the different strokes. Put that back to medium there. For example, if I go all the way up here to this brush, if I get into my mask, I can see that I am using a heavy stipple. What's really cool about this is with no artwork selected, I can go into my heavy stipple just by double-clicking it there. Now I can go ahead and make any changes that I want to this. It's actually going to actively change it on my artwork and every instance of that brush on the page. It's a good time-saver if you want to make some small changes later on, it'll actually automatically update if you allow it to across all of your documents. It's a really easy way to go in and fine-tune all of them at once without having to manually change this line and this line and so on and so forth. It's a great time-saver. Of course, these are the very same situation. You're simply just making different settings. I'm using more or less a different type of dot that I drew, but I'm using similar settings. We can go in here and double-click "Heavy", so you can see for the reference. But again, I'm just playing with settings and I am leaving this preview on and I'm seeing what I think looks cool to get the effects that I want. But again, it would be a bit redundant to go over each of these options. One thing you may not have known, however, is that if you ever want to change the actual source of this, if I double-click this again, the sources here, but it's also shown right here. That's the source of the brush. If you want to change it as you can see, if I'm clicking here, I'm dragging, nothing's happened, it's not working, but if I simply grab my new source, what I want to be my new resource and I drag it right on top. You're going to see, again, that it doesn't want to, it wants to make its own brush. But if I hold "Option" or "Alt" on a PC and I just highlight the brush, I'll let go. As you can see, it's automatically changed the source of that brush and it will update in all of the artwork. That's how you would change the actual source of the stamp. Moving on, let's say you wanted to make other types of brushes. What else can you make with a scatter brush? Another great one like I showed before is stars. Simply using this one star right here, this one's a simple graphic. It's actually hidden away in the menus right there. It's not something I had to manually draw, it's a shape that's already in Illustrator. I'm able to draw a straight line just like all the others and I'm able to make this cool varying star effect. Just by double-clicking here, you can see I've got everything set to random. I've got a one percent to 15 percent increase, so the smallest star is one percent, the biggest is 15. Same idea with the spacing. I have it varied. I have the scatter completely varied as far off the line above it and below it. Then the rotation, again, is completely varied. It can be any degree. It's all going to be related. Again, I have that set to path, doesn't really matter. It's probably just what I select at the moment, and that's it. That's how you would make a cool varying star brush. What's nice about that, like I said, is that you don't have to manually draw these dots. You can probably think of different ways to actually do this. Maybe it's going to be stars, maybe it's going to be leaves, things like that, that appear randomly in your artwork. It'll save you a lot of time to actually just make a brush. This is where we get into what I would consider a little bit of a more gimmicky scatter brushes, what I've seen other people do. I just took this heart, this is from Noun Project, just a vector source. Again, you're randomly scattering the hearts. Again, the settings are all very similar. I'm just messing around with them. I'm not going to go over each one again. Again, I consider that a little bit gimmicky. I just don't see a lot of examples where we're going to be using this day-to-day. I like to use most settings or features daily. I don't want to just have, oh, here's a gimmicky thing I'm going to use once and forget about forever. To me, these are just gimmicky. The leaf is a little less gimmicky. It can be a little more useful because if you're drawing art with leaves then, of course, you'd have some different variances, but the same idea where it will just randomly be all over the page. Before I cover that coloring method, and you may wonder what that colorization is, I did want to show you some other examples of using stipple brushes that hopefully can spark some creativity within you. You don't have to be an amazing artist to use it. As you can see, just having a font and adding a stipple with a mask inside of the font can be really effective and can make it look very cool. I've put together this little 10 shot collection on Dribbble. I simply searched stipple up here in Dribbble, and then I found some examples that I thought were really cool. You can see there's a lot of really different types of artwork, but just adding some stipples can really add a cool effect to it. These ones are perfect circles. They're not that flawed kind, and you can see here that there is such a great, wide variety of different styles of artwork that can benefit from adding these types of brushes and really make your artwork pop and stand out on the page. Hopefully, these images will give you some real good inspiration to try using brushes.
7. Colorization for All Brushes: What I did here is I used that same leaf, and I made a green line and I made a burgundy line, and I clicked and I dragged it in, and I made the different versions, a none, tints, tints and shades, and hue shift. I'm just going to select "None" here and we'll double-click. Again, these are all my random settings and you can see that colorization is set to none. When it's set to none, you're simply going to see the brushes in the colors and settings that you had over here. Your original stamp is just going to be stamped randomly, but the color is not going to be affected. Even though if you look over here, my stroke is set to orange, that's having no bearing on the actual brush. On the other hand, if I were to select tints in that setting, you can see that with the orange selected, it is actually tinting all of the brush orange. It's tinting the black lines, the green lines, and the burgundy lines, and of course, you're getting different effects because of different shades, this burgundy being a darker value than the green, but it's all being tinted [NOISE] with that orange on top of it. Now, we've got tints and shades. This sounds a little bit more confusing, but I experiment with it and I just recommend that you experiment with it. But you can see that it is adding the orange on top of the color, but it's not really affecting those dark shades like that black, see. It's not really affecting that and the same thing, the burgundy, it's basically just putting it on top of it. The orange on top of the burgundy is getting a really dark color, so now you're getting into brown. But that's the difference between tints and shades versus tints. Hue shift is a pretty interesting one because it's actually just going to pick one of the colors and it's going to totally shift the color. Let me show you how to do that. This is over here when you see this key color option. Just to backtrack for a second, you see this little tip button beside, because this is a confusing method, a domain that's really handy little sheet. If you click that, it'll show you what will happen. This is what your source brush looks like. It'll happen with each setting. Showing you if you had green as your stroke and you had tints on, this is what it would end up looking like, hue shifts, so on. This is really handy to actually visualize the different changes, but I've tried to do that for you here as well. Now, what's happening here with this hue shift is it's going to straight-up change the color to orange on the color that you choose from the key. Now the confusing thing here is you would click this eyedropper tool and I was trying to click out here, that's what I would normally try and pick a color somewhere. But what you have to do is pick it within the source here. Within this little box. If you have green selected, what it's going to do is it's going to replace that key color of green with whatever your stroke color is. If I cancel out of this, I can turn it to any color I want, make it purple for example. You can see it also is messing with the other color too, but it's not straight replacing it like this. It's a weird setting to mess with, but regardless, it's an option. But if you want to change that, you can click this and you pick one of the other colors, like say this burgundy color. Sometimes if it doesn't look like it's updating here, just click "Preview" on and off, or even just click "Okay" and "Apply". Then it'll change for some reason, I don't know if it's a glitch with the program. But now you can see anything that was burgundy has now been replaced with my key color of purple, or in this case, my key color of orange. Again, it's randomly shifting that secondary color along with that hue and it's again random, but that is some options if you actually want to play with the hue, this is definitely going to be more useful for my purposes when you're making stipples, for example. Let's go back up to the stipples for the last time. What we want to do here is we just want to click pink. Now you can see that unfortunately, it's still black, so that's clearly a problem. Let's go in here, and we're going to check our colorizing method. You can see tints and now all of a sudden it's nice and pink looks good. Tints and shades, you can see what's going to work best for you. Not working. Hue shift, not working. There you go. Now you know, tints is the way to go, click "Okay", "Apply to Strokes." Now anytime that you're using this stipple brush, you can also simply change the color of it. That to me is going to be a little more useful and a little less confusing than this version of it. But regardless, it's always nice to have different options. But that is the scatter brush. I'd love to see if you have any other examples that you think are really useful above and beyond what I've shown and hopefully, this covers all of the different options for making a scatter brush. Let's move on.
8. Art Brushes: Now we're getting into our brushes. Personally as a graphic designer and illustrator, my favorite are by far art brushes. These ones I find the most unique and the most helpful for the type of art that I'm creating, but of course it's all going to be personal preference and it depends on the kind of artwork that you are creating, whether it's for logos, different types of branding, illustration, whatever it is that you specialize in, brushes can be super useful. But what I love about them is when I'm doing any illustration, again, logo design too, because it can give me a different type of aesthetic or style than what I'm actually creating. What I mean by that is when I'm creating something like this truck in Adobe Illustrator, I find this easier to create in Illustrator than, say, something like Procreate. I love to draw on Procreate, but because it's mainly made up of basic shapes, I can make it way quicker in Adobe Illustrator. But the problem is it'll look very vector, it'll look very perfect, and I don't want it to look that way. I want it to look hand-drawn. But using my own custom brushes set that I'm actually working on right now, it will eventually be for sale, but basically by actually creating my own brushes, I can try and mimic almost my hand-drawn style in Adobe Illustrator. Now if I'm creating in Adobe, in the Illustrator or if I'm creating in Procreate, I can have my artwork look very similar, even though I'm using two completely different tools in two totally different ways of drawing, which is really cool, I think. I'm having a really consistent style output, even though the way that I'm actually creating them is pretty different. This is another piece of artwork that I've created recently. This is another example of something that's very geometric. For me drawing this by hand is quite tedious because I want it to be fairly accurate. I think it's way easier to create art work like this that's very geometric in Adobe Illustrator. It's got perfect circles and lots of rectangles and things like that, so much easier to just create this in a vector format on the computer than it is to actually draw it. But I can get that hand-drawn look just by adding a little bit of texture and adding some art brushes that make it look a little more hand-drawn. I'm a big fan of this. Here I have this brush set that I'm working on. You can see I've got these rough ideas and rough names right now. But again, I'm just going to use Command H or Control H to hide those strokes for now. You can see this looks a bit hand-drawn, especially if we zoom in here on these circles, you see the flaws, you can start to see the stroke colors and fill color blending into each other. There's lots of little parts that are rough and some are a little cleaner than others. But again, this looks handmade. It doesn't look vector, it doesn't look like it was made on a computer. Of course, if I do click "No Brush" there, you can see that's what it actually looks like. That's what the artwork actually looks like. It still looks nice. That's obviously the idea when you're creating an art. It still looks clean and cool, but it just doesn't have that aesthetic that I'm looking for. If I undo there, you can see that looks a little bit cleaner and nicer to me. There is a little bit of a give-and-take when you're using art brushes because one size doesn't necessarily fit all or at least in my experience. For example, if we look here at this little light, see how the lines are really jagged or really rough, but the rest of the artwork isn't really like that. It's because basically it's shrinking my stroke, my art brush that I've created into a very small space. Those little subtle changes, those jagged subtleties are being squished down and they're becoming very obvious in this specific spot. I am selecting. Now it's turned my strokes back on so you can see. This is why I've started playing around with this idea of a large, a small, and a medium. Basically I can change based on the size of the shape. That way I can get it a little bit rough. It's got this light wave, but it's on small and that'll allow it to be rough and imperfect, but not too dramatic. That's the one give-and-take about using art brushes. You may want to use different brushes for different lengths of your stroke, but it's also going to depend on the type of brush you're making. Let's get into how I actually created this and how you might create other styles of art brushes. What I did to start with is I just created a line, and I drew this using just the pen tool and then I went in and wiggled things around, made sure that my caps had an edge to it and then I outlined it. It's one big shape. Then you can go in there, you can grab your points, and you can drag them around and make all those sorts of changes to make it just imperfect. Basically, I wanted it fairly straight, probably straighter than I can actually draw by hand necessarily. But then mess around with it a little bit afterwards. Now, there's a give-and-take. If you have this rounded end like this, what will happen is if you create a closed path, it'll show at the edge here. I'll show you what I'm talking about. Just like how we've created brushes in the rest of the class, we're simply going to grab this and we're going to drag it in here. We're going to select "Art Brush", click "Okay", and we'll just call this class test. Now you really only have one option here that'll be highlighted unless you have a graphics tablet plugged in. As I've mentioned, the signs are basically the same, those react to your tablet. There's no sense in going over those anyway. We're going to leave this at fixed width of 100 percent. Later on, if we feel it's too thick or too thin, we can change that. Now our next question is depending on the lines that you're creating, whether you want this design that you've made here to actually stretch proportionately, so the whole entire line will either grow in thickness and in length or we can stretch it to fit the stroke length, which I'll show you in just a moment. The next option is stretch between guides, which I'm going to show you a better example of, again, in a moment. The direction will just show the direction of the line. Most of the time you're going to want to leave it. It depends on how you're drawing your line. If you've drawn your line horizontally, you're probably going to want to choose horizontal, right to left or left to right, and if you're drawing it vertical, like I have here, then you're probably going to want to check bottom to top or top to bottom. It's just going to depend on the artwork that you've created. Colorization is going to work just like I'd shown in the last lesson. You can click here and I'll show you some examples because I'm making lines, it's going to be pretty straightforward, and we can flip along the vertical axis or the horizontal axis, and we have overlap. I'm going to show some of these things that I just glanced over. To start with, we're going to select Scale Proportionately and I'm just going to hit "Okay". I have my class test. If I select this circle that I've created here and I click "Class Test", as you can see, because I have a rounded cap here, anywhere where I have an actual shape that connects, you're going to see that rounded cap. It's ugly. It doesn't go all the way around. That's why a lot of the times what I'll do is actually cut that cap off. There is a way to do this using a pattern brush, where you can have both worlds. I'll show that in a little video later on. If you want to avoid this, then that's when you would add no cap, just a flat cap like that. But what's important is if you're creating a flat cap, so let's just say you've come in here with your eraser tool, I'll do it on this original on here, so let's duplicate this. Let's just say here I've got my eraser tool, that's Shift E on my keyboard and holding Shift, I'm just going to draw a straight line across. Just like that and then I can delete this point. I have a nice perfect straight line. Now if I go to the bottom of this line, we can do the exact same here, just like that, a nice straight line. Now the problem is I want those to connect. The best way to do this is to choose which end you like the best. Let's just say I like the bottom. Making sure that we have our smart guides on and hit, "Command U," and that way they snap. That snapped perfectly. Now what I want to do, is I want to select my lower line there and I'm going to use my direct selection tool to grab that point and I want to snap it exactly to the path above it. Just make sure it's not missing, just like that and then I want to do the exact same thing over here. This will ensure now that I know those points are exactly where they need to be, that this will nicely repeat basically along my line. If I take this path now, I go back to that class test. I showed this in our earlier lesson but if we click drag and we're going to hold Alt and we're basically going to click that class test, it's going to override what I was using there, we'll go ahead and click, "Okay," Apply to strokes. Now you can see because it doesn't have that end cap, it's nicely filling all the way throughout the line. Now the variation in this line is very subtle, it's hard to see but it's there and now that we know that, that is actually going to nicely combine. When I'm creating different shapes, we'll just go ahead and here and click class test. You can see that they nicely combine. But this creates again, another issue, let's double-click again this class test and see in here what's going on at my end cap, how it's not really connecting nicely, this is where our overlap is going to be useful, do not adjust corners and folds or just overlap. I had it adjust corners and folds to prevent overlaps. But actually, in this case, we want that overlap and now that's going to nicely close that line and we'll go ahead and click, "Okay" and Apply to strokes. You may notice it actually gets thinner here than other corners, that's because of the variation in the line that I'm creating, that's great for this effect, that's totally fine with me. A lot of the times when you're creating your own custom brush, it's probably great to have a few different lines, a circle, a rectangle, a square, few different types of shapes so that you can test to see how that brush will interact with all of those different objects. Another important thing is that you want to be able to actually color your lines, as you can see here, my stroke is set to black and if I go ahead and I select red, as you can see, it's still black, that's because my original source was black and it's because of how I have my colorization settings on. I'm going to double-click this, I went through this on an earlier lesson, I'm not going to go too in-depth but basically, you can just select tints and now it will allow you to actually make your brush whatever color your stroke is which is super-useful, very important. To be clear when creating your very own brushes, you can still, of course, change the opacity up here, it doesn't need to be fully thick and you, of course, can change the thickness on the individual shape. If that stroke felt okay on this shape and now on this one, we can of course, just increase our stroke just like any other brush. Totally straightforward, very easy. Now I want to talk a little bit about that scale proportionately. I have two lines here, I'm going to take one line and I'm going to make it much smaller as you can see there and selecting both of these, I'm going to hit this class test. Now you can see there's a bit of a consistency error here. What I have here is that this longer line is actually thicker than the shorter line. A lot of the cases I might want this thickness to be the width of the stroke to be the exact same even though they both say, if I highlight one point it's because it's scaling it proportionately, I don't really like that. A lot of the times I'm going to want to be able to go to stretch to fit stroke length, I hit, "Okay," Apply and now you can see is that these are the exact same thickness and I think that's a lot more consistent and just a lot better because you don't want to have it solidify. Let's make a couple of different circles here. If I select these circles, I make sure they're all one but if I double-click this and go back to scale proportionately, even though they're one point, the thickness of each circle is different because of the size of the circle. To me, that's not very useful in most instances. I'd much rather actually stretch to fit the stroke length. Let's go over something else that interesting, let's say that this is the line that we want. I'm actually going to use my width tool let's shift W on my keyboard, it'll make it real thin layer just for the sake of it. Let's say that this is my new art brush that I want to create, that's totally fine. It's probably best just going to duplicate that to actually expand it, it's all one line and I'm using unite and my Pathfinder and just make sure it's all one clean shape. Then I'm just going to drag it into my panel here and select art brush. Now, I'll show you basically what I'll happen if we leave the similar settings on to what we just did with our last brush. I'm going to come over here, I'll draw a line this way and for the sake of it, I'll draw a line this way and then we'll click that brush that I just created and see how it's stretching and skewing the actual shape. But it looks pretty ugly to me that's not what I wanted to do. But if we go here and scale proportionately, now you can see it's too small here, it's too big here potentially though they should be consistent. Here's the best way to actually make a brush like this. This is when the stretch between guides becomes extremely useful. What you want to do is you're telling the brush, I only want this part of the brush to stretch over the entire line. In this case, I guess it's like a floridly, I want that to not be stretched whatsoever. We'll just come in here and we'll click, "Start and as I click, "Up" on it, you'll see a line moving across, that means anything on the left of this line is not going to be stretched at all. Let's just go, it's a little hard to see. It'd be nice if you could zoom in here and then the end of the line is fine in this case but if I didn't want it to, I could tell it to not stretch anything to the right of this line as well but in this case, I think that's okay. I'm going to go ahead, hit, "Okay," Apply to strokes and now as you can see again, these are the same width but the shape remains the same even though the stroke and the length of the stroke is totally different, that's super cool, very useful. Again, a lot of these settings you have to try and think outside the box. This is where this would become useful. I was talking about having that end cap there. Now, another issue is when you're drawing some lines like so. We want to put this class test brush on, here we don't have any end to this line. If you actually do want to have an end but you don't want it to stretch out, that's another good example of when to use that. Also, if you're using any brushes, you notice a little weird line here and that's because I actually have a fill on by accident. I'm just going to select that fill and hit, "None." Now there's no fill, so there's just a weird little issue with Illustrator, make sure your fill is off unless of course, you want it. As with anything, there's so many different ways to use our brushes and I don't want this class to be four hours long, I can't go over all of them. These are just from the brush library. I just went in here and I opened, I think this one is from grunge brush vector pack or something like that. I selected one of these brushes, these are different styles of art brushes. You can get some really crazy variants and what's great is you can always download brushes from the Internet or use brushes that are already pre-loaded into Illustrator and you can just double-click them and make all the changes you want or learn from them, see what they did to make it look the way they did and make changes that are great for you. This is another instance here of being able to use that stretch between guides really nicely. It's not stretching this area of the brush, it's only stretching that middle of the brush. This is another instance that could be used probably in a pattern brush there is some overlap but this is a good idea. Hopefully, that covers everything about creating an art brush. Again, there's so many different versions and I don't want the class to be seven hours long but our brushes are awesome. I'd love to see what you guys can create in them. Let's move on.
9. Bristle Brushes: All right. We've made our way to the fourth option and that is bristle brushes. In this option, of course, we can create all kinds of bristle brushes and the idea is that you're going to stimulate a paintbrush or maybe even a dry marker effect, which is an effect that I think it looks pretty cool. Again, this is not a brush type that I'm going to be using a ton personally but it actually again once I'm playing around with some of these things more for the class, I start to realize, oh, hey, this is more useful than I thought. I could probably use this in my art style and the type of things that I like to create. I didn't realize that I could do this or I thought maybe I should have used an art brush or something like this. Sometimes you'll get surprised when you start experimenting with different styles. You can see over here that I've created my very own washed out marker. I'm just going to double-click here and you can see some of my settings. What's pretty neat about this is that the density of the brush is so low that you're actually seeing the overlap of the brush like almost you're getting into a watercolor effect here and I think that that looks pretty cool but on the converse and the opposite side of that, you could actually make it look very opaque and very thick and it can start to have sort of that chiseled marker. It looks like a marker with some dried out areas in it that gives you that dried line, but it's a nice thick brush. I think that's a really cool effect actually. This is examples of that washed out version, the dried version or you can start trying to think again outside the box and adding a gradient to your stroke. Trying to use these brushes potentially with other effects and you might get some really interesting variance. Again, this actually works really well for creating typography or creating any kind of hand lettering with that cool marker effect and of course, the main idea of it is to actually be able to go in and add ratio. This artwork I created in Procreate but I added the shadows on top. If I ungroup this, this is just using the brush shadows on top in this drawing them in. I don't want to make it too long but the idea with the bristle brushes is a lot like the calligraphic brush where you don't actually have a brush source. You would just click "New" and you would go down to Bristle Brush and click "Okay". Your brush source is quite simply the options that they're giving you. You have all these different types of brush options. I'm not going to go over them because there's straightforward and it's just best for you to experiment with them and then from there you're going to be able to make some different changes for sure. We're going to actually go back up here. Let's select this, for example, and let's double-click it. Say you've started creating your own brush, I've used a flat point and let's play around with the sizing for example it's always best to make sure you have preview on, select some artwork and actually see how it's going to look on some artwork or on some line work. That gives you an idea of the size, pretty straightforward it's the size, the thickness of the stroke. The bristle length is different, it's similar effect but you're getting a little bit more range in the actual lines and then the density is what I mentioned before. If we crank that density right up, see it's starting to really blend those lines and if I pull it right down, then there's like no blend at all. See right there is no blend and here we're getting some of those lines in there. It's really great to play around with this. Bristle thickness you're getting all sorts of different variances. I guess it's just the actual thickness of each bristle in the brush. A little hard to see here and then the paint opacity. We've got opaque. We can crank that all the way up. Now you have that really dry marker thing happening. It's very thick lines, there's no blends, there's no lighter lines, and we can go all the way down. It's washed right out, like watercolors. That's a pretty cool effect. I like playing around with that option quite a bit and then stiffness again, you're just going to see some sort of random variations is all to do with painting. You can see as I drag that up, some weird things are starting to happen. The program's doing some funny things with enclosed full shapes. A lot of the times, you just have to drive us around to what looks best with your specific artwork because you don't want those weird glitches happening. There you have it for the bristle brush, I'm going over this on much faster than the others because if you've been following along, you are getting the idea of how all of these work as a whole and with these ones, it's best to really just get in there and experiment. It's pretty straightforward because you don't have all these different color options, you don't have different source options. It's really just going to be playing around with these sliders to see what looks best in your specific artwork. There's no sense and being redundant and going over that too much. There you go. That's the bristle brush. Let's move on to the last one, of a pattern brush.
10. Pattern Brushes: It's time to talk about the final type of brush, a pattern brush. The options here are pretty crazy. You can do a lot of different things with the pattern brush, and there actually is some overlap where you could be creating art style brushes and pattern brushes. The sky is the limit. Let's get experimenting and will show you the different options. The main different thing about pattern brushes, of course, over top of any other type of brushes is that you're able to repeat a piece of the brush throughout your stroke, as needed, and then have some areas that don't repeat or only show up in specific instances, like corners, for example, like you can see here with these borders. These pattern brushes are really great to create, rope type effects here. They're also great for creating things like a bike chain using a simple little source here, you can see there, and that they're cool to add some different effects for coloring and things like that as well. There's some sneaky ways to do that, and then we'll get into adding like a more of a picture frame type aspects. There's a lot of different ways to create a pattern brush. To start with, I'm going to show you the basic idea. Using a simple object like a chain, all I've done here is I've created this link and then I've duplicated. I've duplicated here on the right and I've duplicated on the left, and then this part actually has a stroke on it to actually separate them. Then what you need to do is actually expand it and make sure you merge it all down so you have a simple piece of artwork. I'm going to use my one tool here. Hit Command X, and now using Command A or Control I on a PC, I'm going to select all those white or null objects and hit Delete and command F or Control F to paste it back in place. Now I'm only this black object, just like so. In order to create a pattern brush, you need to consider that whatever the shape is you're creating, it's going to be basically duplicated all along the entire stroke. In order for it to duplicate accurately, let's just try and draw like a white box over the side here. What you want to do is imagine that this and this are going to be cut off. You need to make sure that this part of the brush exactly lines up with this part of the brush. It's pretty easy when you have something very symmetrical, and that's what you're going to have in most cases. In the rope brush that I'm going to show in a moment, it's a lot more complicated. But the idea is I'm going to use that box there to crop it, and then if I duplicate this artwork, I'm holding Shift and Option. You can see with my smart guides on with that snaps right there, that is a perfectly lining up. You see how perfectly it lines up. That's how you know that you're going to have a brush that works really well. Just like all the other brushes in this class, all you would do is drag this into here, and then you would select Pattern Brush and then click "Okay". Then I will just show you one of my pre-made setups right here. This is how I have it pre-setup. You can see the corners look strange. You can set this to anything. It could even just be set to none or you can have it auto-centered. I'll just leave it at auto-centered. You can see that it looks wrong, but I'll show you why that doesn't matter in this specific instance. Just like some of the other brushes, you can flip it along or flip it across. But because my artwork is symmetrical, it doesn't really make much of a difference. Just like I showed before, we can stretch it to fit. We can add space, but you see how it's just adding space in-between. So I don't really think that one's useful very often, or it approximates the past, that's just approximately figuring out where it needs to land. Sometimes it's not going to be super obvious what the stretch to fit approximate path are. They look very similar, but just mess around with your artwork and see what looks best for what you've got. I'm going to skip colorization because we've covered that over a ton of times already in this class. Going up here to scale 2, once again, we've covered this idea over and over in the class, so there's no sense in doing that. Spacing just like the other thing it's going to add spacing in-between, and that seems silly to me. We're going to leave that as Okay, apply the strokes, and you can see now that we have that brush. That same brush is set right here, and the reason why I didn't care about the corners is because in real life, if we were to make a chain, a chain is not going to make a perfect square. What I would actually do is using my direct selection tool. I would just click this and I would make these more rounded corners, and it would start to look right because that's how a chain would actually be in real life. It would probably be even more rounded than that. That's why I didn't worry too much about the corners for that specific brush. Now you may wonder how to actually add some gradients and make this brush look a little more detailed. I've done that here and I've added some different gradients on each shape. The problem is if I drag this in here and I click, select a pattern brush, this little dialogue box pops up. It says that it's using an element that cannot be used within the brush, and that is that gradient. What you end up having to do is we drag this down here. We'll go to Object, Expand, and now we can either use a gradient mesh and it'll just automatically do it as it thinks looks best you can decide whether that works, or you can go expand and then choose specific objects. Just click 25 in this case. You can see you're seeing all of the different lines that make up that gradient. You can crank that up. It's going to be a little more intense on your computer, or you don't have to, but let's say we make it 200, for example, now it's getting hard to tell. You can change the color of this to blend a little better. But it's getting harder to see now that there was even a gradient. That's nice. I've left it with this one for the sake of it because when you're zoomed out a little bit, as you can see, the brush looks the exact same. You're making the brush the exact same as the others, but you're just expanding that gradient before you create it because you cannot make a pattern brush with a gradient in it, unfortunately. Keep in mind too that when you're making a colored brush, if you go in here and try and change the color, you're going to be running into all issues, and that's what you need to play around with the different tints and shades and those things, which again, I've covered earlier in the class, plenty. Now I want to talk about creating a frame. If we go into our library here and we can go down to Borders, and we have all different types of borders, decorative. We'll just click "Frames", and you can see different options there. I think this one here was from the decorative selection, Borders_Decorative. I believe it was that one right there. There's all kinds of great brushes, but what's interesting about these is you can actually break them apart to see how they're created. We go to Object, Expand Appearance, and now if we actually ungroup this, you can figure out how the person made the brush. They made this like this, not like that. That's how they made the repeating pattern along the line, and then this is how they made the corner. You can try and learn from that, and you can have this. The line continues on just like it's showing here, and then that little cap was heading out which was closing line. It's a little off there. Let's drag it like this. It's closing that line. It works fairly well. It's good to try and learn from people that have already created it. Now I found this really great tutorial. It was actually on the Creative Market blog. I'm going to link that in as well. I just want to show this person out. I just want to shout out Beth R for creating this pretty cool document because this is definitely a pretty complex thing to create. It's best if you actually read through this. I'll put the link for this in the class too. But the basic thing that we're doing is, in my case, I've created this box here, and I've made sure that my artwork is very symmetrical. It's landing perfectly on the side as it is on this side, and the line is centered. What I've done is I've added little boxes, and this line is perfectly centered within this box. This is a complicated way to do it. But we've created basically our corner piece like this, and then the key is because of this corner piece has this big box around it. If I delete this here, then when you're creating your end cap piece, you need to make sure that it is the exact same size box. So I have no object here. I have a box with no fill and no stroke. Just to make sure this is the same exact size as this piece, I've continued to add there. That'll be my next end piece, and I continue to here. Again, that way this line will connect to this line, will connect all the way along. These are a little bit out of order, but the same idea applies. Then you can create that and turn that to a null. This is a weird thing about creating a pattern brush, is you want to drag this into your swatches panel, and that's right, your swatches not your brush. You want to let it go there and do the same with each of these, and make sure you have that null selected. Then what's going to is once you have that done, we'll hit a new brush, we'll go down a pattern brush, and then in here, this is where you're going to be able to find those swatches that you've created. You're going to actually select them. I'm going to go to my pre-made brush here, this pattern brush right here. You can see that I went and I selected my corner brush, which was down here, and then I went and I selected my line brush right there, and then I have auto centered for this cap here because I found that using this corner piece set it off. See how it's all crazy there. Sometimes you can use those auto design ones to work. Then I have a Start Tile and an End Tile. That's just going to allow those lines to not just randomly end. Just like all the other brushes, you can fix, you can play with the spacing, you can flip them, you can stretch and approximate and colorize, this stuff is all the exact same as we've talked about a lot in this class. We don't need to go over that. But this is how to make a complicated brush. Now, this is tricky. This is going to be hard. You're seeing, it's getting squished and stretch there. There's things you're going to have to do to actually work on this and make sure that your brushes are really good if you want to build something as complicated like this. But this is really great for editorial use. Maybe you're making wedding invites or any of those things. Having these nice decorative borders that you've custom created, it can be really cool to do check out this little blog post because it goes over some pretty great detail on how to make sure that your brush is perfectly designed to actually make one of these stamps. I think it's very neat. So shout them out. There's no sense of me going over it when you can read that post because it's pretty in-depth. Last thing, I just want to show another complicated brush as far as how it looks. It looks very neat. This is a very cool-looking brush. I like that. It's all hand-drawn and I like how perfectly the pattern is going and you can actually download this. I'll put a link for this also in the class. It's made by the vector lab. It's totally free. The great thing is if you find a brush online for Illustrator that you either buy or don't buy that you got for free, then the cool thing is, as I've shown before, you can simply import that into Illustrator. We can duplicate the line, go to Object, Expand Appearance, and if we ungroup it, then we can start to drag apart the pieces, and you can see that this is duplicated throughout this line. See here this is the exact same piece over and over again. That's what's being duplicated. It's just hard to tell because it's been nicely cut here, and that of course, connects perfectly to this end, and you've got the start and the finish tile. So these are really cool. It's a really great way to make a different type of pattern brush, and hopefully, it will be inspiring for you to create your very own. Now that we've got to the end of pattern brushes, we're almost done with the class. Let's move on to the next video.
11. Saving & Importing Brushes: Now, I just want to talk about how to save your own brush library. Let's say you've put a ton of work and you're creating your own brushes like I have here. They're not all finalized, but let's just say they are for the sake of this purpose, and I want to be able to open these in other documents. Of course, every time I open this document that I've created them in, they'll show up. But I want to make sure that they're easy to get, I don't have to copy and paste elements, it's a bit too much work. All you're going to do here is open your Brush Library as we have here and you want to make sure that this entire library is accessible. In order to save this brush set that you've worked so hard on, well, hit this "Hamburger Menu" here and go down to Save Brush Library or you can go down here and go Save Brushes, either will work just fine. Now it's going to open this area where you can save the brushes and you want to make sure that you can easily get to that spot. A lot of the times you're probably going to be better off just to save it to your desktop. We're just going to call this Test brush for the sake of it. We're going to save it to our desktop. Now, the reason why I'm doing that is because I think it's better to keep a copy somewhere handy. You may want to put it somewhere else safe where you've got a good backup of it. Now if we go to Open Brush Library and then we click "Other Library", we want to see where Adobe wants to find the brushes. You can make this just open a random document that you have somewhere. But it's usually best to save it where they want it. We've got, in this case, Illustrator 22 presets, en_US, brushes. I'm going to open up Finder here. I've got finder open and I want to grab this test brush and I'm just going to copy it, so Command C. That's just making sure that I have this somewhere smart. Again, I'm going to move it off my desktop but somewhere where I have a nice backup of it so it doesn't get lost in the Adobe ecosystem. From there you can see this is what happens when you upgrade to a newer version of Illustrator. Any of these presets that you've set up in old versions will still be there but they're in this obsolete folder that you now have to transfer into the next version. This is why I like to keep my very own backups to make sure nothing gets lost. On a PC you're going to have to unfortunately look this up online. You should be able to find the easy way to do it but I'll show you on a Mac, we're going to hit "Adobe Illustrator 2022" that's what I'm using in this case and our presets, en_US and we're going to go into brushes and now we've got different options here. It's probably best to make our own library. I had to enter my password there and I'm just going to call it John's brushes. Within there, I'm going to paste that test brush. I know that was a lot of rigmarole but now as you can see John's brushes appears. We can go ahead and click "TestBrush". Now, what's cool about this is although that was a lot of steps from now on because we saved it where I just showed you, which is within Illustrator's own folder system. Now if I go ahead and make a brand new document, you can see all of these brushes are gone. But because I saved it where I showed you, which is actually in Adobe Illustrator's folder. If we click the "Brush Library", it should show up right here. You might sometimes see it under User Defined or you'll see it right there. It's nice and easy and quick to open so you don't have to navigate to that folder. Now if you didn't save it within Adobe's ecosystem, that's when it gets a little bit more of a hassle and it may show up under User Defined or you're going to have to navigate manually to it every single time. That's very annoying. You want to do this and then as I showed earlier in the class, what you could do is close all that stuff and we can make this persistent and just put this brush wherever we think safe. Let's say we put it in this document here. Then if I close Adobe Illustrator completely and I reopen Illustrator completely, this will still be here and I won't even have to navigate or find it. That is a super-easy way to do that and of course, loading brushes that you've downloaded off the internet will work very same. Just instead of taking them from your desktop, take them from your downloads folder or wherever, put them right where I showed you, it's the exact same process. That is how you say your very own brushes so you can use them later on across all kinds of documents.
12. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] We did it. We made it. Thank you so much for taking the class. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do take a moment to review the class. It really helps the class get more traction on the platform and be sure to hit "Follow" in my profile. It should be around here, if you do click to it. It's under either Jon Brommet or Crusoe Design Co. Of course, at this point I've taught over 30 classes and all of them are in a range of different topics for design and illustration. Please do check out some of my other classes. A natural one, if you did enjoy this class, I would think is to check out my Procreate Brush Studio class, that's if you do any illustration in Procreate on the iPad. It's very similar to this class, and then I break down all of the different ways to make brushes. Procreate has a very unique and cool way to make brushes and so much more control. Really awesome if you like illustration and as far as graphic design, I've taught tons of classes, customizing fonts, lots of things on logo design, a lot of great classes. If we get into the illustration side, we've got the pen tool, monoline illustration and things like that. I've taught a really wide variety on how to make sure you are efficient and doing things the best way possible. Of course, you can follow me at crusoedesignco on Instagram, and that's the best way to keep up with all my classes and my merchandise and any work I'm doing. Lastly, on YouTube, I periodically very scattered, put out some mini tutorials that don't make it into full classes. There's some great information on there too, if you like my style of teaching. That's it for me. I hope you have enjoyed the class. Thanks again for watching and I'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.
Jon Brommet, Crusoe Design Co.
