Make Art Brushes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Make Art Brushes - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Make Art Brushes in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're making art brushes. We're going to learn all about art brushes and how we can make them behave the way we want them to behave and how we can make them paint in different colors. I just know that you're going to have a lot of fun with this class. Now as we go along, if you see the little indicator to give the class a thumbs up, please, if you are enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These thumbs up really help other people identify classes here that they might want to do, so they're very valuable to me. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so too. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your projects. Let's get started making art brushes. 2. Make Art Brushes Part 1: Our first art brush is going to be one for a vine and then we're going to make one for leaves. We're going to start out with the vine brush. I'm going to click on the "Line Segment Tool", I'm just going to drag out a straight line. I'm holding the "Shift" key as I do that, so it's perfectly straight. The line has a black stroke and no fill at all. It's really important it has no fill. We're going to increase the stroke on this line, so we're going to make it quite a bit thicker. I've got 15 points here. Just make it look something like this. Then we're going to this drop-down list here, which gives us some brush profiles, and we're going to take this width profile so it changes the shape of our brush. We're going to expand this brush now by choosing "Object", "Expand Appearance", so it has no stroke but it does have a fill. At this point, we could make changes to our brush if we wanted to, but I'm pretty happy with that as a basic brush shape. I'm actually going to make a brush out of it, so I'm going to select it with the selection tool. I'm going to the brushes panel. If you don't see your brushes panel, go to "Window" and then select "Brushes". I'm going to click on this icon in its top-right corner, and that opens up the little fly-out menu and I'm going to choose "New Brush". We're creating art brushes so I'll click "Art Brush" and click "Okay". This is our art brush, and at the moment it's going to paint from thin at one end to thick at the other. For me, it would be better if it painted thick and then thin. I'm going to reverse the direction on this brush, so it's going to paint thick first, thin second. I'm going to set the colorization mode to tints, that's important if we want this brush to paint in color. At the moment I'm going to set it to stretch to fit stroke length because I want you to see how that looks and we'll change it in a minute. I'll click "Okay". Now, if you've finished with your brushes, you can generally delete them, but I like to just tuck them away just in case I need to come back and make some changes to them, or if I want to use this as a basis for a second brush, for example. Now I'm just going to close down the brushes panel, I'm going to deselect my brush shape. I'm going to select a color from the swatches panel for my brush, so I'm just going to select this color here. It needs to be my stroke color and I don't need any fill at all. I'm going to select my "Brush Tool", going back to the brushes panel to select the brush that we just created. If I double-click on my brush, you can see how it's going to paint. I'm working with a mouse today, so I have it set to smooth, so it's going to paint in really smooth lines. That's really handy technique to use especially if you think that your brush is getting a bit wobbly. So click "Okay", and now I'm just going to draw and my brush stroke is going to be applied to my lines. Now, I'm thinking that these lines are a little bit thick and that is because of one of the settings in the brush panel. Let's just double-click on the brush and see what's causing it. What's causing it is this stretch to fit stroke length, if I scale it proportionally. It's going to look a whole lot better and you can see already it looks better. I'll click "Okay". I get a choice as to whether to leave these strokes as they are or to apply it to existing strokes, and I'm going to leave these strokes as they are and now let's draw a different ones so that we can see the difference. Now this brush now has the setting applied to it so it's always going to paint just like this and it's a nicer brush. Sometimes you might find that your brush looks better with a different setting and you can just double-click on the brush to reopen the panel, make your changes, and then decide as you come out whether they are to be applied to all the strokes in this document that have that brush applied to them, or only the future strokes that you create. I'm going to remove this first branch, and we'll keep this one and we'll go ahead in the next video, and we're going to create the leaves for our vine. 3. Make Art Brushes Part 2: To create the leaf flower of a vine, I'm going to click here on the ellipse tool. I'm going to drag out an ellipse. At the moment it's filled with black and it has no stroke, which is good for this shape. I'm going to the direct selection tool and select either this point here because I want to convert it into a point. I can do that by clicking here on the convert selected anchor points to corner tool, and that just makes it pointy. The next thing I want to do is to cut a piece out of this leaf and to do that, I'm going to use the brush tool, but I'm going to make sure that I'm on just a basic brush at this dye. So I'm selecting basic brush and I'm just going to paint a line through my leaf. I'm just going to draw that now it's really hard to say. Let's go and select it, and let's make it a different color. I'm just going to make it a red color. Now this is the piece I'm going to be cutting out of my leaf. This is the piece that I'm interested in just working on a little bit. I wanted to flow through my leaf and I wanted to be a bit thicker, so I'm going to increase its stroke length. I'm going to cut this piece here out of this piece here to start off with an aid to expand this shapes, I'm going to choose object, expand appearance, and that just makes it a filled shape. Now I'm going to select over both of these pieces. I'm going to use the pathfinder. You can get to that by choosing window and then pathfinder. I'm going to use this option here which is minus front, and what we're going to do is take the front shape from the back shape, which is going to cut this red piece out of this leaf, and it's gone. Now this is my leaf shape. I'm going to size it down quite a bit because it's very big. I'm doing that holding the shift key, I'm making sure that it's black. It's really important that it's black if we want to be able to re-color our brush later on and to have the color be accurate. I'm going to select the brush tool here. I'm going to click the drop-down panel here, choose new brush. We're going to make it an art brush and click Okay. Now we learned a lesson earlier about stretch to fit stroke length and scale proportionately. Scale proportionately is what we're going to need for this brush. We'll just check how it's painting, so we checking the direction. It's going to paint from this end through to this end, it'll start here, finish there, which is pretty good for a leaf brush. It's probably a fairly logical direction for it to painting. Now I'm going to set my method to tint and click Okay. Let's go back and get a green color. I think this was the one we're working with. We're going to select our brush. This is our leaf brush. Now it's been applied to this shape. I'm just going to undo that and I'm going to move away from this shape. You can see also that I had it selected when I chose these colors so it's actually changed color as well. It's got no fill and a stroke, so let's just take it out of the way because it's a little bit disconcerting what it looks like right now. Let's go back to our brush, and now we can just paint this on. It's going to paint at a size that matches the brush stroke length. If I want little leaves, I need to do little brushstrokes because it's proportional. If I want bigger leaves then I'm going to do a bigger brush stroke. If you bend your brush, you'll find that the leaf distorts a little bit. It's going to distort along the path of the brush. If you want your leaf to be a little bit bendy, then you can just make your brush stroke a little bit bendy as well, and of course, if you don't like the stroke that you've put down just press control Z, command Z on the mark and you can just undo it. There is a vine and leaf brushes. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and make some flower art brushes. 4. Make Art Brushes Part 3: We're going to make some flower art brushes here. This time, we're going to use a slightly different technique in setting up our brushes. I'll explain why when we do so. Let's start with a line segment because these flowers are going to come with their own stems. I'm going to drag out a stem from my brush and just expand the line a little bit. I've got a black stroke and no fill. Again, this is important for these brushes. I might want to give this a slightly textured look. I'm thinking that I might actually apply this width profile to it. But the width profile has gone heavy at the top and light at the bottom. I want to reverse that. I'm going to click on the Pen tool and all I'm going to do is just click once on this point at the very end of this shape. What that does is it inverts the line. But you can say that my Pen tool is still attached, so I'm just going to press the Escape key and that's just going to turn it off. It's a handy way of reversing a line when you have one of these brush profiles attached to it. Now we're going to create our flower. We're going to do that using an oval. I'm selecting the Ellipse tool. I'm going to select black as my fill color, and I'm going to drag out a small ellipse. I'm just going to click here to make this end pointy. I'm going to bring this end in. Let's just zoom in a little bit, going to get the Direct Selection tool. I'm going to select this point here, I'm just going to drag it inwards a little bit. It starts to buckle under here. That just gives me a nice shape petal. I'm going to select over this and just make it a little bit smaller. Now we'll use a repeat transform process to make our flower. With the shape selected, I'll choose Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Transform. Now I'm going to do a five-petal flower, which means that I made full copies of this. I'm going to type four in here. I want to see what I'm doing, so I'll click on preview. I want to rotate it around this point here and that out of these little nine boxes is represented by the one in the middle row on the far right. If I click that box, the shapes are going to rotate around this point. I want them to rotate enough degrees that they're going to go all the way around 360 degrees. Well, if I don't want to do the math, I can get Illustrator to do it. I'm going to type 360 divided by which is a /5. When I tab away, Illustrator goes and does the math for me so I'll click, "OK". This is my flower shape. Let's just press Control 0 to zoom back out. I'm going to select over this shape and I'm going to expand it with Object, Expand Appearance. This going to double-check in my last palette. For anybody who's having problems with their shapes becoming a little bit overcomplex, it's always a really good idea to have a look in your last palette and just see what you've got here. Well, I've got lots and lots of shapes. I'm actually going to select this and I'm going to ungroup it. Then I'm going to ungroup it again until I just have single path. Now I have five paths, which are these five petals. Now I'm going to group them all together again in a minute. But I need to do something with this stroke because right now, it is a line with a profile applied to it and I need to turn it into an actual object. Now I'm just going to widen it a little bit now that I've seen what my flower looks like. I'm just going to take that up to five points. Let's bring my flower down. I think that that could probably be resized a little bit. Now, let's expand the appearance on this shapes. I have it selected, I'll choose Object, Expand Appearance. Again, checking in my last palette to make sure that all I've got is one path for that. I do, so I'm just going to reposition my flower a little bit. I think I want to rotate it just a little bit. Now I'm going to put the stem back in place. This is going to be the flower that I'm going to paint with as a brush. I'm going to select over all the shapes, I am going to group this. Object, Group. I have one group that has six very, very simple objects in it. Now, I'm going to make this an art brush. I'm going to select it, select my brushes panel, click the icon here, choose New Brush, and let's choose Art Brush, and click "OK". Now we already know some of the settings that we need to be aware of. We'll have a look here and see that the brush is going to be drawn from the top-down. That would mean that we would draw the flower by clicking at the top and dragging downwards. I think it makes more sense to go the other way. I'm going to reverse the direction of this brush, so it's going to paint from the bottom up. We already know that scaling is going to be an issue, but we'll have a look at that in just a second. But we are going to set out colorization method to tints so that we can color this flower. So far as scaling the brush, we have an option that we're actually going to use here that we didn't use on the earlier brushes because it didn't make sense. We're going to choose, Select Between Guides. What that's going to allow us to do is to say to Illustrator, "Okay, you can stretch this part of the brush, but we don't want you to stretch the flower. We want the flower always to be in proportion." What we're doing is just dragging this guide, this dashed line down. So Illustrator is allowed to change the dimension or the scale of this strike, but it's not allowed to touch the top. We'll just click, "OK". I'm just going to tuck that out of the way. Let's go and get a color to paint our flower in. Let's make it a pink flower. Let's go and get a brush. We'll make no fill here. Here's my brush and I'm just going to draw it now. You can see that the brushes drawing true to how we set it up. The flower head is not being altered in size, but the stroke is being stretched out where it needs to be. That's the way that you set up these brushes. Now of course, if you twist your brush a little bit, the very end of it is going to get a little bit distorted. Let's just do that a bit more obviously here. You can see that the flower is becoming distorted because the brush turns over at the end. Let's have a look at the line here. You can see that the line is bending there. If you want your flower head to look accurate, you want to head in a sort upwards direction at the very end of your stroke and then you'll flower head won't be distorted. This the first of our floral art brushes. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and look at creating a grass brush. 5. Make Art Brushes Part 4: Now we're going to look at some other options for creating art brushes that are pretty interesting. I'm going to select the Ellipse tool again, I'm going back to my default colors by pressing the letter D. I'm going to drag out an Ellipse here. I'm going to switch my stroke and fill colors, and I'm going to turn off the stroke. I'm only working with a fill here. I'm just going to reshape this object. I'm going to select this end here and just make it a pointy end. I'm going to drag it out. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I do that because that drags it out in the same plane. I'm going to grab this point here, and I'm just going to bring it in because I want to flatten the top of this. That's a pretty good shape for me. Let's just move it over here and I'm going to attach a stem to it. The stem that I'm going to attach is just going to be a solid line. I'm just going to click on the Line Tool here and I'm going to hold Shift as I drag a line. I'm going to give it a stroke, so it's going to have a black stroke. Again, black because we want to be able to color it later on. I'm just going to make sure I balance out the white of the line. I think probably just a two-point line that's going to work here. I'm just going to line this up. If I'm not sure that they are neatly aligned, I'm going to select both objects, and I'm going to select this vertical aligned center option so that they are centered nicely. I need to expand this shape object expand appearance, or object expand. Now, if you're confused about object expand and object expand appearance, just know that they're exactly the same. It's just one appears or the other. You never see both. Just choose whichever one happens to appear. I'm just going to double-check here in my last palette what I've got here. Well, I've just got a single compound path, but it's in a group. I'm going to ungroup this object, ungroup. Now I have one path for this line, one path for the head of the flower here. I'm going to select either both of those and put those in a group so they are grouped together. Now I'm going to make a brush from these. With them selected, I'll choose the brushes panel. I'll click this drop-down list, click "New Brush", click "Art Brush," click "OK". Same thing, Tints. We want to draw it from the bottom to the top. That's looking good. We want to stretch it between the guides because we don't want to distort this top. I'm going to bring this guide back to here and just click "Okay". Now let's just pop that out of the way for now. They selected, I'm going to choose a color for my brush. It's going to have no fill. It's going to have a colored stroke. I'm going to select the brush tool, and then I'm going to select my new brush here. Now let's draw it. Now it's drawing a little bit on the big side. I think that it probably had too big a head on it to start off with. But it is a really interesting brush and you can get a lot of mileage in terms of greenery and flowers and things with just a brush that looks as simple as this. Now, if I draw it really small, this is what it ends up looking like. It ends up like a little mushroom. If you liked this, you could make it a brush. Let's just go and grab this particular one. It is a line with a brush attached to it. We can't make a brush out of it at this stage, but we can expand its appearance. When we expand its appearance, let's go to the last pallet and see what we've got. We've got a group here with two pieces in it, the stem and the flower. Well, those two can actually be joined together. Let's just go and get the stem and the flower and let's go to the Pathfinder, and let's click "Unite". We just made one shape out of this. Let's just re-check the last pallet. Okay, we've got one path with just this one shape in here. That's perfect for us. Now let's go and color it because we want to color it black so that we can re-color it when we make it a brush. There's our shape, we may want to straighten it up just a little bit. Now let's take it and make a brush out of it. Same thing. We want to stretch it between the guide so we don't want the top to be distorted. Tints. Make sure it brushes the right way from the bottom to the top. Makes better sense to me. I'll click "Okay". Now let's click away from it. Let's go and select the brush tool. Let's make sure we're working with no fill and a black stroke. Let's go and select our brush. Now you're going to have two identical brushes here. It probably would've been better if we'd named these brushes. But the most recent brushes always going to be further down the brushes panel. It's going to be this brush that we just created. Now let's draw it. You can see that unlike this brush which it was based on, it has a flat top. Of course, we can re-color that. Just got black as my stroke color. Let's go and select these objects. We can just give them a different color. Let's make them blue. We've created three brushes. We start off with the flower brush, and then we created this paddle shaped brush. Then we found a shape that we'd actually painted using the paddle shape brush, which was an interesting shape and we extracted it, got it already and made a brush out of it. 6. Make Art Brushes Part 5: Finally in our explanation of art brushes we're going to create a colored brush and just see how that behaves. Now, we're just going to do a simple geometric colored brush. I'm going to make this shape no stroke and I'm going to give it a fill color. It's just an ellipse. I'm going to fill it with this green color and I'm just going to give it a pointy top by selecting the topmost point and choosing this corners option here. Now I'm going to draw a circle and I'm going to fill it with this lighter green color. I'm going to draw an ellipse and fill it with this red. Then I'm going to draw this ellipse and fill it with this red. I've got four shapes here, all of which are different colors. I'm selecting however all of them and I'm going to click here on the horizontal align center so that they're all nicely aligned with each other. Then I'll hold the shift key as I just move them up and overlap them. Now, if you think your shapes might have moved out of alignment as you moved them up the document just re-select them and just double-check by clicking this icon. Now, I want this shape below this one so I'm going to select it. I'm going to choose object, arrange, send to back and that will move it behind this red shape here. Now I'm going to give this a stem. I'm going to a line segment tool and I'm going to drag a line. I'll hold the shift key, it's going to be perfectly vertical. I'm going to select the line and I'm going to make it filled with a darker color. I need to stroke color here. Let's just go and get dark green for this. I'm going to increase the width of my line a little bit and I'm just going to move it up into position. It also needs to be centered. I'm just going to make sure it's nicely centered. I need to expand this line, so I'm going to choose object, expand. I need it to be behind all the other shapes so I'm going to select it and choose object, arrange, send back. I have this multicolored shape now. We select all these objects and just double-check my layers palette to see what I've got. Well, I've got the four shapes at the top but there's a group down here. I'm just going to click on this to ungroup it because it doesn't need to be in a group. Now it's just a single path, so I have five paths. I'm going to select those and group a lot of them. I'm continually looking at my layers palette to make sure that everything is really neat. Now we can make a brush from this. Again, we're making an art brush. Again, we want to stretch it between the guides because we don't want the top of this fancy brush to be skewed out of shape. We want to draw it from the bottom up so I'm going to select this option. But now for colorization method, we need to make some choices. We can use none and if we use none, this brush is always going to paint regardless of what color we have selected, it's always going to paint in its true colors. I'm going to choose a red stroke here and a green fill. I'm going to click on my brush to select it, I'm going to select the brush to paint with. Regardless of what color is selected here, this thing is always going to paint this color. Now, there is another option that we can use. I'm actually going to create this brush a second time and we're going to choose different options for it. It's going to be art brush click "OK" and I'm going to call this a hue shift 1, just so we can find it easily. Again, I'm going to stretch it between the guides, I'm going to re-direction it, but this time I'm going to choose hue shift as the method of colorization and I'll click "OK". I'm going to click away from this, select the brush tool, select my hue shift brush. Let's go and get a stroke color here. I'm going to choose this blue as my stroke color and now look what happens when we paint with the brush. It has a hue shift applied to it and it's shifting hue relative to this stroke color. If we change the stroke color to a pink for example, then the brush is going to change color as well and so we are going to get this multi-colored brush. Now, there's one other option in the brushes palette and we're just going to quickly look at that. I'm going to re-select this brush, I'm going to make an art brush out of it a third time. I'm going to call this a tint version. Same thing, adjusting a stretch between guides, making sure that it's going to draw from the bottom up. Our colorization method this time is going to be tints and shades and I'll click "OK". I'm going to click away from this brush, I'm going to select my brush, I'm going to select the tint brush. I have a magenta color selected here. Now let's just draw out this brush and you can see that it's painting as tints of the color that I have selected there. If I go and select a blue, it's going to paint as tints of blue. You have these different colorization methods available for your brushes. The one that makes most sense for a single colored brush is just to use tints so that you can recolor it. But for a multi-colored brush like this, then you have always options of either none, so it paints true to its colors, or allow it to do a hue shift or just use shades of the color that you're using. Now, one final thing that you may want to do with these brushes is to actually save them so that you can use them in future because they're going to disappear because they're attached only to this document. What I suggest you do is you click here and choose save brush library. Then you give these brushes a name. You might call this abstract brush and just click "Save". Now when we open a new Illustrator document, you'll see that the brush is not available here but we can go to this panel and choose open brush library user defined and you'll see here that your abstract brush is in the list so we can click abstract brush and a little panel opens with our abstract brushes available to us. We can just click on it, click on our brush tool and we're up and running, creating an illustration using the brushes that we have created. Your project for this class is to go ahead and to create some art brushes and to share the results of the art brushes with us. We'll be interested to see what sort of brushes you create and how they paint in Illustrator. You may want to experiment with some that you make as black brushes so that you can color them as single color but also with some multicolored brushes that are either going to paint true to their color or which you can change the color off using for example a hue shift. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with and I'm very excited about the possibilities. Now, if you enjoyed this class, please give it a thumbs up. The thumbs up are really important because they're a way of others to find out that the class is one that they may want to take. If you feel like leaving a comment, please do that too because I read all of your comments and I look at all of your projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.