Transcripts
1. Hey There: Hey there, and welcome to the world of custom brushes for Adobe Illustrator. I'm Nina, even though most people know me as Di Ujdi. I'm an artist, illustrator, and pattern designer. In the last class, I showed you how to make your own handmade textures and use them directly in Adobe Illustrator. Now, we'll go one step further and create our own handmade brush collections. Sometimes digital art can be flat if you just leave it as it is. But if you managed to combine something that is handmade than organic with what's purely digital, you're in a win-win situation. Unlike Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator doesn't have a lot of textures or brushes that you can use. But on the other hand, it has so many useful options and it's a great program for illustration or graphic design. In case you're using Adobe Illustrator as your program of choice, or you want to keep the vector quality of your files, or maybe your client is asking you to use it, it's always good to know how to make these textured vector brushes so you can use them later to achieve the desired handmade effect. I'll cover a range of painting mediums that I use and I'll show you how I make different styles of digital brushes using watercolor, ink, pastel, and other mediums. It's always better to make your own digital brushes than to buy them because you're in control of what you want to achieve. After you learn this technique, you can always customize your brushes and make as many collections as you want or as you need. We'll be using various art supplies, a scanner, Adobe Photoshop for certain mediums, and, of course, Adobe Illustrator. This class is for all levels. But if you're a beginner with just the basic knowledge of these two programs, you will be also able to follow along. By the end of this class, you'll have your ready-to-use brush collection for Adobe Illustrator and you'll be able to create digital illustrations with your own handmade dutch.
2. The Project: The theme for this project are stripes. This will be a great way for you to use your new custom brushes. Also using stripes in illustration is a wonderful trick to add volume, dimension, and structure. It's also easy and very effective, especially if you combine a simple illustration with hand-made brushstrokes. For inspiration, I made a Pinterest board where you can see how other artists use stripes in there illustration and get your creative juices flowing. In the project description of this class, you'll find a link to it. Be creative. Take away the concept of stripes as far as you want. Leave them as regular lines or disconnect them. Convert them into dot stripes or heavy brushstrokes. All in all, feel free to experiment and share what you've made. Now, let me quickly take you through the structure of this class and also the supplies that I'll be using.
3. Class Overview & Supplies: This class is divided into three parts, and each part is dedicated to different type of brush in Adobe Illustrator: art brush, scatter brush and pattern brush. Because of the way that each of these brushes are made, we will take also three different approaches. Now when it comes to painting or drawing supplies, mostly I'll be using this ink pen and I'll be also using watercolors, black ink, and soft pastel. Also, I have brushes in different sizes and shapes. The quality of the brush really doesn't matter, but it's good to have a few different types and last but not least, I'll need some paper for ink or pastel, it can be a regular A4 printing paper. But when it comes to water colors, it has to be a thicker paper, at least 200 grams because it needs to absorb all the water from watercolors. If you have all of this great, but if you don't it really doesn't matter. You can use whatever art supplies you have and get creative. This is not a definitive guides and I'm using all of this just to show you different techniques. So as an addition, you can use markers, acrylic, gouache. Most of the brushes that I personally use are made with just this ink pen. So regarding the equipment that you do need to have to follow along and complete your project, you will need a scanner, Adobe Photoshop for certain mediums like watercolors because they need additional editing, and of course you will need Adobe Illustrator. Also, in the class resources, you will find a downloadable file with my scanned brushstrokes so you can take it and easily follow along. So without further ado, let's jump right into making handmade brushes for Adobe Illustrator.
4. Art Brush: Welcome to the part one where we'll be making art brushes for Adobe Illustrator. These brushes are agreed for recreating or getting brushed shapes and textures like for example, water color, dry brush, charcoal. But these are not very good for precise drawing because they stretch and get distorted. Here you can experiment with lots of different painting mediums or brushes to recreate those textures or shapes. I'll be using watercolors. One color is just enough. The only suggestion I have is not to use very light colors because you want the brush stroke to be clearly different from the paper background. Also, for making watercolor brush strokes, I'll be using a thicker paper. This one is 200 grams and it's basically a mixed media paper, not really designed for watercolors, but it works well for what I need. I have some brushes, the black soft pastel and also black ink. For these two, I'll use a regular A4 printing paper. I'll experiment and make various brushstrokes and later I'll just pick the ones I like the most and digitize them. So let's begin. You can now see how everything looks when it's dry. I also use the regular hairspray to seal the textures I made with a soft pastel. It wants much or come off. Our next step will be to scan these wonderful experiments and add them to Adobe Photoshop for a quick added before we move on to illustrator. So I'll be scanning this in the resolution of 600 DPI and saving it as a JPEG file, you can scan this in higher resolution if you want. My only advice is not to go lower than 300 DPI. Welcome to Adobe Photoshop. I added my scan images and I'll now show you how I like to edit them. It's very quick and easy. First, I'll go to adjust the levels on this image. Choose go to image adjustment and then click levels. Here, I'll bring the luck a bit up and I will also bring white. You don't have to exaggerate here, also try to find a good balance, and let's click ''OK''. Now let me tell you something, when I started making my own brushes, I watched a lot of other watercolor brush tutorials for illustrator and I just never like the end result because it was too noisy and with a lot of crisp edges. I like to make my watercolor brushes more smooth and I will show you a little trick that makes that possible. Of course, if you like it to be more noisy, just don't apply this and continue from the next step. So what I do is use a blur filter. Go to Filter in the upper menu, select Blur and Smart Blur. This will smooth out green and noise between edges where you have two contrasting colors next to each other. So it works perfectly for what we need. We have this little preview window, so we can see what we're doing. I will play with Radius and Threshold. I will put it maybe around 30. You can look at this window and see what you're doing until you're satisfied with how it looks. Now let's change the quality to be high and we will leave the mode to be normal and let's click ''OK''. By the way, one great trick to know is that you can edit parts of your image separately. So in case you have different mediums on the same page and you want to edit them differently, you can just use a Lasso Tool. It's right here in the toolbar and you can select one part that you want to edit. Disconnect the Lasso Tool. Now we have this selected and for example, when you go to adjustments to adjust your levels, you will see that only this part of the image changes, and to get out of it, just deselect it, Click Command D, and that's it. Okay. So that's it when it comes to editing watercolors. Now let's move on to our ink strokes and pastel strokes. When it comes to these textures, i'm just going to quickly adjust the levels as I showed you with the watercolors. So let's go to Image Adjustment and then Levels. Here, I want the strokes to be completely black. So bring black and I want my background to be totally white. Here i'm exaggerating, unlike with watercolors and that's the same thing that I will do with my pastel strokes. Let's click ''OK''. So we have this ready and I will do also the pastel strokes, and I will speed the same. Now we have everything ready. Leave your Photoshop open so we can copy paste the brushstrokes we want to make into vector brushes and I'll see you in Adobe Illustrator. Welcome back again. We're in Adobe Illustrator. I opened a new art board insides of 2000 by 2000 pixels and I will hit shift command H, so I can have everything white and I don't have these art board boundaries. That's how I like to work. I'll go back now to Adobe Photoshop quickly and grab one brush stroke from each category. Lets open Photoshop. Now, I will pick one that I want to work with. I will grab my Lasso Tool from the toolbar menu and I will just select it. Now when you have it selected, just hit command to copy it and go back to Adobe Illustrator and hit command V to paste it. Great you can see that now we have our first watercolor brush stroke, and I will now go back to Adobe Photoshop to grab two more. Everything is ready now but before we start, let me show you what I always do before making a new brush collection. In case your brush window is not open, just go to Window and click on Brushes. In your brush window, you will see a list of default brushes, and what I want to do is to make it empty so that I can have a clear overview of the new brushes that I'm making. I will go to this little Burger menu and click, select all unused, and you will see that the main default brushes cannot be deleted and that is also fine, we can delete the rest of them by clicking on this little delete icon. Let's click Yes, and that's it. Now, that we have that settled, let's start making our watercolor brush first. I'm now going to image trace it, so let's select it and go to Window and open image trace, so we can adjust all the settings that we need. When it comes to water colors, we don't want to image trace them in one color since we will lose all these lovely watercolor washes. I will image trace it in six colors. In the preset I will select six colors. You can do more or less, it's just a preference. In this advanced settings, in case it's not open for you, just click on it to open it and I will select ignore white and also I will select snap curves to lines. You can always play with paths, corners or noise, what I see now looks very good, so I will just click expand in this upper part to finish. Now, you can see the result as I mentioned, because we use the blur filter in Photoshop or brush is more smooth. Before we proceed, I want to show you how they look in comparison. I'll grab the same one but without a blur filter, and I will adjust it in the same way in Illustrator. This one is without a blur filter and this one is with the blur filter. Again, it's always your preference but it's good to know that you can use the blur filter in Photoshop to get more smooth brushstroke, or you cannot use it and get this brushstroke with noisy and crisp edges. Let's continue. I will delete this one and I will proceed with the one that I like. I'll just select it and in the brushes window I'll click on the new brush icon, and select art brush. Here we have a few different options, you can play around and decimal out. What I mostly use is stretched to fit or stretch between guides. If you use stretched between guides, you can preserve the beginning and the end of your brush, so you can just pull these guides. In these areas will not stretch, but what's in between will stretch. When it comes to this type of brush, I don't have any interesting add points that I want to preserve, so I will select stretch to fit. Also, you have an option to select a direction of your brush. My recommendation is to put it in the same direction that you draw it, so in this case it was from left to right. I want to keep it organic and I will preserve also the direction in which I made it. Also make sure that this overlap settings is selected so that the corners and folds don't overlap. Regarding the color settings, you can click on this information button to see all the explanations. For watercolors, it's best to use thins and shades, so your brush will have not one color, but the various color shades derived from the main one. Let's select it, tins and shades. Now, we can name our brush and let's just click okay. We have our first watercolor art brush, we can now test it out to see how it looks. Let's just grab the paintbrush tool from the toolbar, and select our new watercolor brush and I'll put it in some nice baby pink. Let's see how it looks. Wonderful. Another good thing to know is that you can also always change the size of your strokes, so you can make it bigger or smaller. Now, let's move on to our next two brushes. For these two I'll used to same methods, so I will just show you how to make one of them and you can apply the same method to the other one. Let's use this thin brush and let's image trace it. I will open the image trace window again. Let's go to Window image trace and this time I will leave the preset to be default, because I just need one color. In the advanced settings I will select ignore white and select snap curves to lines. Let's click preview, and if everything looks good, just click expand. Now, while having this selected, let's go to the brush window and click on new brush and select hard brush. Here because I have very nice edges that I want to preserve and I don't want them to stretch, I will use stretch between guides and I will pull my guides inside. These edges will be preserved and what's inside will stretch. When it comes to direction, I will leave it to go from left to right and for the method of color I will choose dense. Let's name it and click okay. Now, we have our ink brush and let's test it out. It looks perfect. You can see that these edges are going to stay the same while what's inside will stretch. As you can see, making an art brush in Adobe Illustrator is super easy and quick. I'll also make the third one. I'll speed up that process and I'll see you in the next part where we'll make some scattered brushes that are wonderful for shading.
5. Scatter Brush: Now let's make some scatter brushes. These brushes are great for shading your illustration and adding a dimensional effect, and they won't get distorted when drawing along lines. But these are not very good if you want to, for example, define the brush corners or be more in control of the brush you're making. Here you can experiment with mediums like markers, spray paint in pastels and get creative while making it. For a demonstration, using just my ink pen. This one is 0.5. You can use various sizes to get bigger or smaller dots. Also, I'll be using a regular A4 printing paper, pencil, a ruler, and an eraser. I also have this little sticky tape that are used to make circles that will be my guides for drawing. You can also use a smaller cup or something else that you can find a home. For me, this is a better way to make circles and using a drawing compass because I'll avoid having a hole in the paper, which can mess up my design later. One trick in case you want to use, for example, charcoal pastel or other mediums or you won't be able to raise a pencil, you can cut out a circle in some light cardboard like this one and basically use it as your guide. I'll start by making a few full circles and half circles to be my guides, and then I'll make different simple brushes using my ink pen. This is how everything looks. When it comes to these dots, you don't have to make them too much dance because later when making a scatter brush will overlap them. To get a good shading effect, I've put more dots in the center and less towards the edges. When it comes to half circles, since we are making an edge brush, make sure your dots don't cross this line if you want a perfect edge. Now, I'll scan these textures using the same settings as I explained before, and I'll jump straight into Adobe Illustrator since I made these brushes with my ink pen, additional editing and Photoshop is not necessary. If you are using other mediums that need an additional Dutch in Photoshop, you can use the same editing tools as I showed you in the bard number 1, where I talked about are the rushes. We're in Adobe Illustrator now, I'm using the same art or does before and I already placed my scanned image. We'll use image trace again to convert this image into vector baths. Let's go to Window and image trace. Since our texture will be in one color, we will use the default settings and in the advanced options we'll again select, ignore white and deselect snap curves the lines. Let's click "Preview" to see how it looks. If you're happy with the results, you can click "Expand". If not, you can also play here and adjust the settings. This looks good to me and I will just click "Expand". Now everything is grouped and I will hit "Shift Command G" to ungroup it and I will select the parts that I want to work with. What we are going to do now is convert this into compound bath. You can hit "Command 8" to convert this into a compound path, or you can go to object compound path and then click "Make." Making it into a compound path will tell illustrator that all these separate dots should be considered as one. Let's make this first one. We have it selected, and we will click "New Brush" in the brush window and select "Scatter Brush." Now playing with these settings right now without some real preview is impossible. We will just name this brush, and we'll click "Okay." Let's make one straight line. Select line can hold "Shift" while making it so it's straight, and then we'll color it and said the outline to be our new brush. You can now see that it looks like a repeat of our objects. But what we will do is go to the brush window and double-click or brush. Now we're back in our window for editing, and we can adjust all these settings. First of all, I will adjust the size and make it a bit smaller. When it comes to size, you can leave it fixed or maybe put it random if you want. One object is bigger and the other one to be smaller. I will also just spacing. I want these objects to overlap. But I also want to find a good balance so it looks organic. Now we can move on to scatter. Now with the scatter, if you leave it fixed, you will see that you can push your brush to go up and look at this Live Preview, put it up, it will just go up. All the objects that we have, the repeating or going up or down. But what I'm going to do is select random, and I will just likely put one part of the objects up and one part of the objects down in case you want your brush to be completely straight and just leave these settings like it is and leave it fixed. Now let's move on to rotation. Because I want to make it more organic I'll make rotation to be random, and then I will adjust both angles. This will basically rotate our objects randomly. I will also look at the preview to find a good balance. This is something I always improvise. I don't use the same settings because each brush is handmade and different, so I follow the preview and decide what looks the best. Now let's set the rotation to be relative to the path, and let's not forget our color. We will also select tins, and let's click "Okay." Also here I will select apply to strokes. That's it. It's very easy. We made our first scatter brush, and now let's see how it works. You can see the results now. I think it looks very, very good. Let me show you now how to make another one, but with a straight edge. Now we will do everything as before and adjust some brush settings differently. Let's select this and create a compound path by hitting "Command 8". Now let's go to the brush window, open a new brush and select "Scatter Brush", again, let's name it, and let's click "Okay." I will again make a straight line as they did before, and I will select our new brush. Let's double-click it and let's adjust the settings. Again, I will put a little bit down to snap to big, and I will overlap these objects. Now when it comes to scatter, I will leave it to be fixed, and I'll bring it up so that the end line sits exactly on the line that we made in our preview. You can see that we need to put it a bit up, so it sits exactly on this line. Now it's perfect. Also, I will not adjust the rotation and I will set the rotation to be relative to the path. Again, I'll choose stints, and let's click "Okay." That's it. Let's make a circle or a square, so we can see how it looks. This type of brush is straight edge brush for the outer edge and it works perfectly. Now, let's move on to part 3, baton brushes.
6. Pattern Brush: It's time for our last type of brush, pattern brush. These brushes are great for drawing with textured lines, line patterns, creating doodle lines, and also they won't get distorted or stretched. But these are a bit more complicated to be made because you need to be very precise while making them. Pattern brush is my favorite one illustrator. I like to make these brushes with my ink pen, but you can also experiment with charcoal, pastels, crayons, or markers. The best thing about these brushes is that you can be as creative as you want, and unlike scattered brushes they have more available settings that you can use to adjust them while creating them. To show you how it works, I'll make a few different ones. As in the previous part, I'll use A for printing paper, my ink pen, and also a pencil, a ruler, and an eraser. I'll start there making straight lines with a pencil and a ruler to be my guidelines and I'll draw my ink lines on them. Now you can see all the different types of ink lines that I've made. When making the brushes that you're going to use as line brushes or regular drawing brushes, just make sure to draw your line on the guideline and that the ends are straight so you can avoid more editing later. I didn't want to use a ruler, so as I can keep the imperfect quality to it. When it comes to doodle brushes, there are so many variations that you can make, but one thing to keep in mind is that you also need to figure out a way to connect them. For example, look at the zigzag line. I made sure that the starting and end point are both down so I can later connect them in Illustrator, and is the same with this brush. Test it out and make a few different ones to see how they later work when you try to connect them. This one is the disconnected pattern brush, you can play here with circles, dashes, dots, stars, whatever comes to your mind. It doesn't have to be perfect, but try to stay on the line. The last one is decorative pattern brush, here you can play with so many different shapes. These two types of brushes, line brush and doodle brush, will be a bit harder to make because we need to do some editing to connect them and we need to be precise. The other two types, the disconnected and decorative pattern brush will be a lot easier to make. I'll scan this and I'll see you in Adobe Illustrator. Welcome back again to Adobe Illustrator. As before, I've placed my scan image and also this time I won't use Photoshop because ink pen is a medium that doesn't require any additional editing in Photoshop. So we can start making our pattern brushes right away. As before, I will image trace this. I will go to window, image trace, and I will use the default settings, I will select ignore white and snap curve to lines will be deselected and let's click at preview. If we are happy with what we see, we can click expand. Now as before, everything is grouped and I can hit Shift, Command G to ungroup it. Our first line will be the regular straight line. We will use one of these examples to start. Out of all of this I will go with this one. Now as I mentioned before, making a pattern brush is a bit more complicated because we need to do a bit of adjusting and editing and also we need to be very precise. Because of all of that, first of all, I wanted to show you how the end result is going to look like so you know why we're doing what we're doing. Let me grab the one that I already made. As in comparison, you can see this one is more straight and the other thing I did to it is I separated the end parts. You can see that I made a cut here and separated the endpoints and also on this side. I did that because I can preserve the endpoints and later while making a pattern brush, I can add it in the settings. Now we have endpoints and the main body of our brush. Also another very important thing that I did is I adjusted the height to be the same for all these parts where I made a cut. Later, everything will fit perfectly like a puzzle. Now that you know how this object is going to look like when we finish all the edits, we can start doing the edit on our main line. First of all, let's prepare everything. If you don't see the rulers, just hit Command R, so your rulers are now showing. Another thing we're going to do is go to view and make sure that smart guides are on and all these snap to grid, snap to pixel or snap to point R off. Now let's drag one guide and I will do the right-click and lock it so it doesn't move later while we're editing our brush. I'm going to try to adjust this brush so it really looks straight on this guide. Now that I finished this tiny adjustment, I will select it and use a puppet warp, you will find a puppet warp in the toolbar menu, just click on it and let's put a few pins. I will now drag this pins so this line is mainly on the center of our guideline. Just a little note, my main goal here is to put the endpoints to be right in the middle of my guideline. I can leave the main body to be a bit more up or down, but I really want the endpoints to be very much in the middle. If everything looks good, we can just hit V and click everywhere outside the object to get out of the puppet warp. You can see now that our line is very straight and we can proceed with our editing. Now we don't need this guide anymore. We can just do the right-click and unlock it, select it, and then delete it. Now I want to make this line a bit smaller. I will select it and then go to transform window. If it's not open, go to window and open transform. I will select constrained width and height proportions and put one pixel for height. Now my next step is to create a rectangle that is going to serve as my guide. Let's go to toolbar menu and select rectangle, and just click. While the transform window is still open, I can see the values of my line, so I will copy them. Now I have the rectangle in the same size as my brush. This rectangle is just going to be a helper for me so I can align everything perfectly. Let's put in some other color and send it to back, shift command, left bracket. Now, I will select both of these objects and click on the rectangle again to make it as the main object so I can align everything, horizontally and vertically. Everything looks great. We can now move on to cutting our endpoints. The way I'm going to do that is again, by creating something that is going to be my guide. I will make two squares in the size of one pixel by one pixel. Let's put it in some red color so we can see the difference. I will again align it to my main rectangle. Let's select them both, click on the rectangle, and align it on the left hand vertical. I will copy paste it in the same place. Command C, command F. Again, the second one I will align, but I will align it on the right. You can see, now we have one square here and one square here. Now stay with me. This is going to be very easy. I'm going to select the square and our main object and just hit shift M and I will just click on this endpoint. That's it. We have it. Just click V and get out of the shape builder tool, and let's just delete these parts. That's it. I think I have one little part here which also needs to delete. That's it. Let's put it in some other color. Let's do the same thing for the other part. Select them both. Shift M for the shape builder tool and just click on your endpoint. That's it, very easy. Let's hit V and just delete the rest of it. Now that's finished. The next thing we'll do is to align these ends to be in the middle of the rectangle. I will align this vertically. Let's select them both. Mark the rectangle and align vertical. I will do the same thing for the other end. I'm doing this because when I start making this pattern brush and add my endpoints, illustrator would position them exactly like this. The only thing left to do is to make all these parts where we made a cut to be in the same height. We're doing this so they can fit perfectly later like puzzle. I will now draw a rectangle in the same height as this end. This will be just my helper. Now I will drag these guides to be exactly on top of this rectangle. One for up and one for down. Now we can delete this rectangle and we can adjust all these parts to be exactly on the guides and to be exactly the same height. We will do this by using the direct selection tool. You can find it in the toolbar menu or you can just simply click A on your keyboard. What I'm going to do is to click on the points of this path. I will click it, I select it and I will just drag it to be on this guide. This is the moment where our smart guides are basically very necessary so we can finish everything precisely. Let's click on it, select it and drag it down. I will do the same thing for the other end. Now I will delete this main rectangle that was our help, and I will just change the color of my endpoints so I can check the whole line and see if there's any need for more adjusting. Everything looks good. You can see that this is completely perfect. We don't need to adjust anything else. Let's see the other end. Here, maybe I will just fix this part so it doesn't look strange. I will again grab my direct selection tool, click on the point I want to change, and just change it a little bit. You can do this for each part that you don't like, and that's it. We finally finished editing our first pattern brush. I know that it might look a bit time-consuming, but being detailed and taking your time with this will ensure that you have a perfect brush later. Now let's drag our start point two swatches. Let's do the same thing for the endpoint. Now, I will select the main body of our brush and go to brush window, click on new brush, and select pattern brush. I will first of all name it so I don't forget later. I will adjust the scale. I want to make it smaller, so I will put it somewhere maybe around 30. Now you can see that at the side tile, we have the main body of our brush. Now let's add the start point. It's right here because we already added it to swatches. Let's select it, and let's select the endpoint. When it comes to the outer corner and inner corner, I will put an option auto-between. Let's do the same thing for the inner coroner, auto-between. When it comes to fit, I will leave it to be stretched to fit, and for the color, I will select dense. Also during your process, you always have this preview window, which is super-helpful. Let's see how it looks. When testing these brush, make sure you zoom in and check if there any mistakes, especially where we made a cut in the part in between the endpoint and the main body of our brush. Here we can see that everything is fine. We also need to check the body of the brush. There is no clearly visible mistake. Everything looks perfect. Let's see the other end. Here, it also looks perfect. It's been a longer process, but we are rewarded with this simply perfect brush. Make sure you take your time to do all the previous edits and adjustments so you have final brush that is perfectly aligned and it fits completely like a puzzle. Now we can move on to our next pattern brush. This [inaudible] brush is basically my favorite because it's fun and playful. This one is going to be also a bit hard to make like the previous one, but I have some super nice tricks to share with you and you wouldn't believe how happy I was when I discovered that. Let's start. I will do the same thing as before. I will drag one guide, so I can make sure that this line is straight. Because this line is not going to be exactly as our previous line because it cannot be straight, it has all these waves. I want to make sure that the end points are exactly on this guide, so later I can more easily added them. Let's make it a bit smaller. Go to the transform window, and let's make if maybe, 13 pixels height. Maybe a bit more. Let's put it in eight. Okay. I will again make a rectangle that is going to be my helper. Let's click on the rectangle and let's copy these values. I will again align this brush to be exactly in the middle of my rectangle. Now let's see in which way we can connect this brush. I will just grab it, hold out, and I will drag it to see how it will connect. Let me put this in another color so you can see exactly what I'm doing. Basically, I'm trying to find the best spot where I can make the cut. These two lines, when they repeat in our pattern brush, they look perfect. I think I'm going to make a cut right here. I will just select my rectangle and hold out. This way, I will make it less wide and I will drag both ends simultaneously towards the center. Let's put it until here. You can see that also the other end is now more towards the center. Let delete this, and also select all of this and hit Shift and to access the shape builder. I will just simply click on this end part and also this end part. Now we have them both separated. Now let's test out our main body and see how it fits. I'm holding Alt and Shift, so it doesn't move and it also repeats. What I'm going to do now is to grab my direct selection tool, to make this bar to completely fit the height of this part. I'm also doing a bit of adjusting so that this end looks perfect. Now I've finished adjusting the main body of my brush so it connects perfectly. I will now delete this and I will again align it to my main rectangle, so just in case if something changed while I was editing this brush. Now we can move on to adjusting our endpoints, so they fit perfectly with our main body brush end. Again, I will do that with my direct selection tool. Our next step should be to end these endpoints to swatches. But you might be wondering how these endpoints are going to work at all, because as we'll learn when we are making the previous brush, bat and brush settings will place the start and end tau in the middle of our main strokes. Since this doodle brush is going up and down and our endpoints are down, it seems like an impossible task to make, but there is a solution. The magic trick is to create an invisible rectangle that will work as a helper. That will basically keep our end path in place. Let's make a rectangle. It will be on the same size, in the same height as our main rectangle and in the same width as our end point. Now we will put the fill to be none, and we will select both are invisible rectangle and the endpoint. Sorry, first of all, let's cover this end point to be black. Great. We can now select them both and group, and we can now add it in her swatches. Let's do the same thing for the other endpoint. I will now select the main body, go to the brush window, open new brush, and select pattern brush. Let's name this one. I will also make it a bit smaller, maybe around 50. As you can see, the side tile is already in. Let's add the start tile and let's add the end tile. These are the swatches we added before. Also when it comes to the outer corner, I will again select Auto-Between, and for the inner corner, I will select Auto-Between. You can also test out different ones. These auto options basically depend on the brush you are making. Let's select that. I will leave it stretch to fit, and for the color, I will select dense. Let's see how it looks. As before with the previous brush make sure to test all these endpoints to see if they fit, if there are any problems within the brush. I can see that here everything looks very good. Let's move on to our next two brushes. Since these two types of brushes are disconnected, they're going to be very easy to make. Let's start with this type. I will grab these circles, so I can show you how I make it. I will again grab my guide, so I can see if everything is positioned as it should be, and I just want to see how it's going to look when I repeat it. Because I see a little gap here that is going to be very visible when I repeat this, let me just delete this one. Move this circle a bit here, and also this one. Great. We can delete the guide. I will add one circle, but I will not add the circle that is on the end. I'm going to add one that is somewhere in the middle. This is going to serve as our inner corner or outer corner tile. I'm not going to add endpoints to this disconnected pattern brush. Let's select it and go to "New Brush" and select "Pattern Brush". You can see in this preview window that some of these circles are overlapping each other. That is because they're just starting where the other one ended. We need to add some spacing. Let's add a bit and let's look at the preview window while we're doing it. I'll add around five percent. We can also test it out later to see if it's good. I will also make this brush a bit smaller. Now as we said for the outer corner tile, I will use the circle I added, and I will do the same for the inner corner. I will not have my "Start Tile" and "End Tile" because it's really not necessary when it's such a simple, repeating, disconnected pattern brush. Let's add "Color Method" to "Tints", and let's name it. You can now see how it looks if it's a straight line. Let's see how our corners look. You see this circle that we added is now serving as our outer corner and also inner corner. That was super easy. Now let's move on to our pattern-decorative brush. For an example, I want to show you how to make this one. Let's grab it. First, I want to feel what's inside of this. I don't want it to be just linear. I will grab my "Direct Selection Tool" and click inside and just delete. I also want to fix this a bit. I will use my eraser tool. You can make it smaller just by pressing "Left Bracket" on your keyboard. That looks good now. I can maybe smooth this one a bit inside. Maybe I can take this one and replace the other one because the other one was too small. It looks good now. Let's grab our "Guide" and lock it. Let's just position this to be straight. Great. We can unlock the guide, select it, and delete it. Now, I want to see if these endpoints are positioned correctly if I align them horizontally with this object. I will "Group" this and make a rectangle in the same size. Let's open a "Transform Window" and click on "Rectangle" and add these values. I will now align the rectangle to my main object. Great. Let's see, when we align this vertically if it's going to look good. You can see that it's basically in the middle and we have no problem with it. Let's do the same thing for the other one. Again, it looks perfect. Let's delete this and "Ungroup" this. First of all, I'm not going to make both end lines on this brush because if I do that, you will see what will happen. This will basically repeat like this, and we do not need two lines to be connected. Look at this, we're just going to preserve one endpoint. Let me just delete this. I'll preserve the "Start Tile". I will add it "Swatches", and I will select all the rest and go to the "Brush Window", click on "New Brush" and make a new "Pattern Brush". Let's make it a bit smaller, and also I need to add more spacing between. Maybe as the previous one, I will add four percent or five percent. Here I'm not going to add any outer corners because all of these options that I have are not very good, so I will leave it as "None". I will do the same thing for the inner corner, and for the "Start Tile" I will add my 'New Pattern Swatch". We will leave it to "Stretch to fit" and add "Tints" as the color effect. Let's name it, and let's see how it looks. You can see that the brush that we made fits perfectly. The only problem that I can see on this brush, is basically right here because it has more space than I would want to. But that's not a mistake in repeat, that's basically a mistake I made while making this brush. If you want to fix it, you can just make a new one and move this part to be more towards the other. Then you will fix what you're seeing now when you get it in repeat. Let's do that. You can see now the difference, we fix this part and it looks much better. Also, another thing I want to show you what I also do because sometimes when I use these patterns, I like to repeat them one above the other and to create a simple pattern out of my lines. Basically what I do is I select everything, but without these little dashes that I have on top. Let's select that and make a new brush. Now let's see how they both look. There you have it. One is for the middle, and one is for the top and bottom. We finished making all of our brushes, and now let me show you how to save them.
7. How to Save Your Brushes: It was a long journey but we've finished making our handmade brush collection in Adobe Illustrator. Now let me show you how to save these new handmade brushes so you can access them anytime and in any file you open in Illustrator. So let's go to the brush window. I will first of all delete the brush that I made, which didn't turn out to be good. I can just select it and click on this delete icon and that's it very easy. Now we have this list full of a new brushes we made during this class, and I'm just going to click on this burger menu and click "Save Brush Library". I will name it skillshare brushes. Let's click "Save" so that's it. Now, if you want to open them, you just click on this icon for brush library and go to user defined and you'll see here your new brushes. We're now almost ready for our project. But in the next video, I will show you a few tips on how to use these brushes so stay tuned.
8. How to Use Your Brushes: You can now see all the brushes we made. We have art brushes made with watercolor, ink, and pastel. We have scatter brushes that we made with an ink pen, so these are now stipple brushes, and we have all these wonderful and playful pattern brushes. Before we move on to make our project, I also wanted to give you a little insight on how I use these brushes. Everybody is different, everybody has a different illustration style, and I just wanted to show you a few tricks I use, and also maybe give you new ideas on how you can use your new brushes. Let's start with art brushes. I made here a few simple examples out of letters that we can use, so I can show you how everything works. Before we begin, let me just bring my transparency window up so you can see it. In case your transparency window is not open, you can go to window and open it. Also, these letters are three different objects. Before we start, because we are going to use a clipping mask, I'm just going to select it and hit ''Command eight'' to convert it into compound path. So illustrator now sees this as one. Mostly when it comes to art brushes, I like to use them for my background. Let's make a background for HEY. I will make one straight line, and I will select the same color, this pink color, and let's select watercolor. In a transparency window, I like to use blending mode, multiply, so I have these very nice transparent textures. I'm going to put my line to be a bit bigger. If I want, so I have a different texture I can make it a bit longer and I can now position it so it fits nicely. Now what I want to do is, I want to grab these letters and copy paste them so one of them is in front. I will just lock this line, select the letters, ''Copy,'' ''Command C'', and ''Command F'' to paste in place. Then I will use ''Shift Command Right Bracket'' so I can bring one of these HEY letters in front. Let's unlock our line, and now I will select the line, and these HEY letters that are in front. Do the ''Right-click'' and make a clipping mask. You can see all these interesting textures that I have by using my watercolor brush. Another way I like to use art brushes is basically as a decoration on my illustrations, so I can break the flatness of an object, and I can give it more handmade look. For example, if I had a clothing or some part of an illustration that I don't want to look flat like this, I can always decorate for example, with stripes or dots that are made with handmade brushes. Let's try now our pastel brush. You can now see the effect that it gives to something that is just digital and flat. That's why I really like art brushes. Now we can move on to scatter brushes that we made into stipple brushes. Stipple brushes are for me, good for shading. I don't use them a lot in my illustrations, but they can really give that nice effect, so let's try it out on this. I will again, make a straight line. I will now put it in some other color. Maybe I can put it in black so you can see exactly what I'm doing and let's select the scatter brush. I will just repeat it so I get an effect of shading. As before, I will use a clipping mask, I will just duplicate this, ''Command C'', ''Command F'', and bring to front ''Shift Command Right Bracket''. Then I will select the one that is in front with all these brush lines and ''Right-click'' to make a clipping mask. You can see the effect that you can also get with the stipple brush. You can also use it on your illustrations, for example, on flowers. You can play with it as much as you want. For example, when it comes to the art brush we made, it can also be a very nice decoration. Also what I wanted to mention is that, you can always change these brushes while you're making your illustrations so you can always adjust them. If you don't like the size of these circles, you can just double-click and change it. It's very good to know that you can always adjust your brushes to be as you want to be. You can change the spacing, you can basically change anything, and adjust it as much as you want. When it comes to pattern brushes, we have a few different types. For example, the first one is our liner brush, and this one is great for drawing, and it's also wonderful to be used as an outline. If you have an object that has straight edges and you wanted to give it a bit of organic feel, you can just simply use this brush as an outline. Let's see how it looks. You can see how the edges now are a bit rough, but not too much because we made this brush to be more subtle. It doesn't get in your eyes but you can see clearly the difference. When it comes to this brush, this one for me is just great for decoration. You can make a hair out of it and also this one. I like to use these little brushes, especially when I make my pots for plants and then I add these interesting decorations. These two are now my favorites, and I love to add them on simple objects, and create towels or rugs that have these interesting patterns. Also, these are very nice to use when you illustrate a room and then you have a floor that you can decorate. Let me show you just how it looks. These are a few techniques that I mostly use with these brushes. Also in the bonus videos, you can see my work in progress and how I will apply all these techniques while working on the project for our class.
9. Thank You: I really hope you enjoy this class. Take-away these techniques, tips and tricks, and does them out. Once you learn the basics, you will see that possibilities and the combinations are endless. Remember, these brushes are as unique as its creator. Of course, if you feel stuck or you encounter any problems while making these brushes, you know where to find me. Feel free to ask anything in the community section and I will respond as soon as I can. To get notified about my next classes, you can follow me on Skillshare. Also if you want to keep in touch, you can connect with me on Instagram at [inaudible]. I'm sending you lots of love and good vibes. Watch the bonus video to see how I approached this project. Of course, share what you've made. I would love to see it and I'll see you in the next class.
10. Bonus - My Project: For My Project, I decided to have some fun and play with haircuts, made with my new brushes, and also make some decoration for their t-shirts. I made this sketch and I'm now going to image trace it and fix a few things. I will now group the eyes, nose and the ears, and I will lock them. The way I like to fill these shapes is just by using my direct selection tool, you can press "A" on your keyboard and just select the inside and then click "Delete." This was super-easy, and now I have the base for my project. I can now start making their haircuts with my new brushes. As always, if you want to play with these cute heads and use it for your project, you can find this file in the class resources and just download it. For the first one, I'm going to use my simple liner brush that I made with my ink pen. Before I start, I'm just going to remove all the brushes from here because I'm not going to use them. Again, go to the burger menu, Select All Unused and just click "Delete". I will bring my new brushes. I will just select them all and I will add them, Add To Brushes. Now I don't have this additional window. Now for my next one, I'm going to use a Pastel brush. Now you can see that this brush is too big for what I need. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add edit it and I'm also going to show you one trick. If you don't want to change the settings to your main brush, you can always duplicate it. You can just click on it and drag it to the new icon. Here you now have a copy of your main brush. If you want, you can make edits on the copy of your brush. Just click twice and I will just change the size. For the last one, I'm going to use an ink brush. This time the size is fine, because I want to have this funky texture that looks very nice. I will just change the size may be here to 0.75. That's it, I've finished their haircuts and I will group everything and unlock these main shapes, so I can start working on the T-shirts. What I'm going to do is just grab my blob brush and I will make a shape, there will be it's T-shirt. I'm just connecting my blob brush so I can get a shape. I will then select a Direct Selection Tool and again, delete what's inside. Of course this is not finished, I will just select the main body, and a new shape, and just click Shift M for a Shape Builder tool, and I will simply delete the rest, we have our T-shirt. To finish everything, I will use a clipping mask, I will just select my lines and hit Command 8 to convert them into a compound path. Then I will select my T-shirt and copy and paste it in place, and just bring it to front. When you convert your lines into a compound path, you will see that when you select these two, that there is no make a clipping mask here. What we need to do is, to go to Object, Clipping Mask and click Make. Or you can use a shot cut, Command 7, that's it. I finished my project and this is how everything looks. I hope you like it and I just want to thank you for watching. I'm looking forward to seeing your ideas and how you approach the subject of stripes, and what ideas you might come up with. Also feel free to use these skewed low humans if you want to play around with haircuts and T-shirt decorations. Thank you again, and I'll see you in the next class.
Di Ujdi, Illustrator & Art Explorer
