Vector Brushes: Building Textured Brushes for Illustrator

1. Trailer: Hi, guys. I'm Jamie Bartlett. For this class, we're going to be exploring brushes in Adobe Illustrator. I'll show you how to make handcrafted textures, turn them into high-quality vector brushes, and apply them to your artwork. You can make your own textures or to get you started, I'll provide you with some textures I've created that you are free to use along with me as we go through the class and build the brushes. These brushes are great at making your vector designs feel a little more hand done while still keeping your artwork completely vector and can really take your designs to the next level. By the end of the class, you'll be able to create custom brushes with endless texture possibilities that will make your work completely unique. To launch the class, I'll be running a contest from March 10th through 24th, where I'll be giving away a brush pack I created that has seven awesome vector texture brushes. I'll randomly select three students to win my brush pack and the grand prize winner will also receive a year of premium membership to Skillshare. So how do you enter? All you have to do is post a completed class project on Skillshare before March 24th and you're in. For the class project, you'll be picking your favorite iconic mid-century piece of furniture or decoration. It could be anything from an Eames chair, Nelson Clock, or a retro lamp. Then design a simple vector illustration of that item to apply your new brushes to. Or if you're just not that into the mid-century, you can pick an every day item from around your home. Let's get started. I can't wait to see what you guys create. 2. Creating Custom Textures: To start, we need to gather our supplies. We need some papers, some drawing utensils. I just gather everything that I can think of. I got pencils, different pens, markers, I have oil pastels, charcoal, anything that can give us some texture. Now, we just start making our textures. First, I'm going to be drawing a texture for our scatter brush and how scatter brush works is it takes a piece of texture and repeats it over and over. We'll be using the scatter brush for larger areas of texture. So for the scatter brush texture, the best texture to draw is a round type of texture. Something like this. Just start playing around and seeing what textures that the different materials that you collected give you. Just scribble some stuff on there to get some cool variations, so you have lots of options to play with. The next brush we'll be making is an art brush, you can almost think of an art brush as more of a stamp. Because whatever texture you draw, that's where your art brush is going to look like. So we want our texture to be more of a line that goes from thick to thin, that looks more like a swoop, like a sketch rush. Just keep doing that a couple times, playing around with it until you get something you like. Maybe try some thicker ones, some thinner one, putting more pressure. You can a try pencil. Just have some fun with it. We need one more texture and that's going to be for our pattern brush. Our pattern brush is similar to our art brush, but the pattern will be repeated. So we want a more even stroke. You're going to want to do a line just like the art brush, but instead of going from thick to thin, you're going to want to try to keep it more even all the way across. So let's go back with their oil pastels and try drawing some lines. It doesn't have to be perfectly even all the way through, but not as drastic, thick and thin as the art brush. So this one is definitely not going to work for the pattern brush because it goes from thick to thin, we want something more like this right here. So feel free to try different methods like a sharp B or if you wanted more of a paint texture, you could grab some paint in the brash and try doing that too. Maybe for the art brush, you want to try something like this. So now that we have our textures done, we need to take a picture of them. The easiest way is to just pull out your phone and snap a few photos. Move around, get some of the other textures. If you don't have very good lighting, you could always try using the flash to try to even it out some. My lighting is pretty even and good, so I'm now go ahead and leave my flash off. There you go. 3. Scatter Brush Prep: Right now we need to bring our textures into Photoshop. If you created your own textures, you can go ahead and bring that photo in or if you want to use my textures that I'm providing, you can find those textures in the notes to this video or the project description. First we're going to start with the scatter brush. The only processing I did to my photos was just bump up the exposure a little bit more. If you need to do that to yours, you can simply go down here, I like to use the curves, so you just click on curves, bump up the lights a little bit and maybe bring down the darks just a tad, you don't need to do much. Once you have that all setup, we need to make a selection of the texture we want to use. We're going to start by making a scatter brush and these are the types of textures that work great for scatter brushes. Go over here and grab the selection tool and let's start with this one right here. Make a selection, it doesn't have to be a clean selection just as long as it has the entire texture in it and then we're going to copy by holding Command C on the keyboard and now we're going over into Illustrator. Let's start by making a new document. The size of your document doesn't really matter. I'm just going to leave mine at 1920 by 1080. Click "Create" and now we're going to paste our texture here. Do that by holding Command V and there you go. To get this texture to be a vector, we need to image trace it. You can go up here and click "Image Trace". Now I just did the default image trace settings, but we want to go in and customize them to get the best-looking texture. If you go right here, you can get the image trace panel up and that will allow us to customize this more. Make sure you have preview check so you can see what's happening right here and then we want to make sure that we drop down the advanced settings. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so you can see what's going on with the texture. Make sure you have your mode set to black and white. The threshold is going to adjust how much of your texture is solid. If we want to bring it down a little bit, more of my texture starts to come through. All these settings are going to depend on your unique texture. As I'm adjusting all of these different settings, I look at this anchor points down here and that's telling me how many anchor points there are. There are 756 is a lot. Why this is important is the more anchor points you have, the harder it is for illustrator to load once you start using these brushes and textures. The goal is to keep the anchor points as low as possible while still keeping your texture, looking how you want it. Before we continue adjusting these settings, go ahead and check ignore white because that actually brings down the anchor count and then uncheck snap curves to lines. Then I'm going to play around here some more. The corner slider will give you softer and more pointing textures by bringing it up or down. The noise brings in a lot more noise, you can see how all these little specs came in, but that also brings the anchor point up. When you're working with these textures, a lot of times you're not going to notice those little things as much, so you can get away with getting rid of a lot of them so that your anchor count goes down. Once you get it looking how you want, then you can choose for something like this and then we can go up here and click "Expand". Now I have just a solid vector texture sample. If your texture has some stray areas like these little points right here, if those bother you, feel free to go in and delete those or adjust any little thing. Now we're ready to start building the brush from this texture. 4. Building The Scatter Brush: The first thing we need to do is resize our texture. Whatever size our texture is when we make the brush, that's the size that the one pixel setting for that stroke will be. So if your texture is 100 pixels by 100 pixels, your one-point brushstroke is going to be 100 pixels. So for this type of texture, we're going to be using this and bigger, broader areas. So I'm going to resize mine to 60 pixels high. I'm going to make sure that I have my constrained width and height proportions checked up here, so that way, my texture doesn't get all skewed and weird-looking. Then I'm going to type in 60 pixels. Click Enter, and now it's resized. For now, we can close our Image Trace panel. Now we need to find our Brush Panel. So if you go to Window and Brushes, that will bring that up over here, and then all I need to do is click right down here and say, "New Brush". In this one we're making a Scatter Brush and here, all our Scatter Brush settings. So if you want, you can name your brush here. I'm just going to leave mine Scatter Brush 1. To make it a little easier, I'm just going to click Okay for now and make a path. That way, we can see what our settings are doing with our new brush. So I'm going to apply our new brush. Right now, it's just repeating the same shape over and over, but we want to adjust it so it looks better. So go back to your Brush Panel, double-click if you did close your panel. I'm going to change my size to random, and I'm going to set that between 80 percent and 100 percent. Right now, we didn't see anything happen, and that's because my preview wasn't selected. So let's check that. As you can see, every time our pattern is repeated, it randomly generates a size between 80 percent and 100 percent. So you can see here that this one is 100 percent and this one is slightly smaller. So that just add some variation to our brush. Next, we're going to adjust the spacing and we're going to leave that at fixed. I'm going to set that to 40 percent. What that does, is that it overlaps each repeating texture by 40 percent. Next, we're going to adjust the scatter. For this brush, I'm not going to have any scatter, but I'll show you what scatter does. Scatter is going to adjust, and we'll just bring this up to 20 percent and this down to a negative 20. What that does is it randomly puts brushes either 20 percent off the path higher or 20 percent below the path lower. So it adds some variation there. So feel free to play with that and use that if you want to, but for this particular brush, I'm not going to use scatter. Then for rotation, I'm going to add random and set that to 180 degrees and then negative 180 degrees. What that does, it randomly rotates my texture 180 degrees in each direction. Which means it can be rotated all the way around. So that just gives me the most variation out of my brush. Then set the rotation relative to page, and then colorization down here. We're going to choose tints, and what this lets us do is customize the color like you would any other stroke. If I left it at none, it would always be black no matter what color I chose. Once you have the brush setup how you like it, you click Okay and say, "Apply to Strokes" because I already have a stroke and I changed what my settings were. So I'm going to say, "Apply to Stroke" and there's my new brush, and now you have a scatter brush. So now you can go over here to your tools panel, grab the brush, and you can create some awesome looking strokes. 5. Art Brush: So now we're going to work on building an art brush. This is probably the simplest of the three. So make a selection of whatever texture you want to use. I'm going to use this one. Let's copy, Command C. Go back into Illustrator and paste just like before, Command V. Let's Image Trace this one. So press "Image Trace", bring up that panel again, zoom out just a little bit, so I can see my entire brush. Make sure Ignore White is checked, and I'm going to uncheck Snap Curves to Lines. Now the anchor count on an art brush, can be higher because it's not repeated like our scatter brushes, it's just used once per path. So let's bring the threshold down a little bit, so we can get some really good texture happening and bring the noise down, and that looks pretty good to me. So let's expand our brush, this little part right here I don't really like because I think that's a part you'll really notice, if you use this brush multiple times in your artwork. So I'm going to zoom in, and just get rid of this portion right here. Then Object, Path, Remove Anchor Points. Now if I just deleted that, and those two points right here would be an open area. So I want to remove so that the path still remains closed. Once I have it how I want, now I need to make this more strict, so I'm going to bring up my rulers by pressing command R, and I'm going to bring that down to right around there. Put this left end over here, right on the middle portion of that guide, then I'm going to switch to my rotate tool by pressing R, by default, their rotation anchor point is in the center of my artwork, but I'm going to just click on the anterior, to move it over here. So now everything rotates from that point, and then I just need to bring this down, until it's more centered. Now that our textures level, we need to resize it, and just like before, whatever size it is now, is the size that the one pixel stroke will be. Right now the height of our brush is 14. I'm going to put that down to 10 pixels high. Now we can make our brush, so just like before, we're going to add New Brush, choose Art Brush, and here are all of Art Brush settings. We're going to leave the width at fixed, and then under our Brush Scale Options, we're going to click "Stretch Between Guides", and what this means, is if your path that you create that you're applying this brush to, is longer than your texture, it's going to stretch your texture between those two points. But if we move these guides to be a little bit inside of the edges of our brush, that means this portion of our texture will never get stretched. This portion will, and this portion won't. Now make sure you have your direction pointed the same direction that your brush is going, which mine is going from left to right. Then just like before, we need to set our Colorization method to Tints, so that we can always customize the color, and then we're going to pick the adjust corners and folds to prevent overlaps, and click "Okay". Now here's our brush that we just created, so if we made a path and there's our brush, and if you want your stroke to be bigger, you just need a boost up the point size and it gets bigger. So before we move on to our next brush, I want to show you the limitations of an art brush. So as you can see here, this is our original texture. If I'm going to make a path that's longer than my original texture, my texture starts to get stretched. You can see all these areas in here are all distorted and stretched. My end portions that were between those guides are not stretched, but everything else is. If I was to make a little tiny short one, everything between the caps gets really squashed. The art brush is still a good brush, but you just have to be careful how you use it, and it's definitely not the right brush for every case, and that's why I'm going to show you how to build a pattern brush. 6. Pattern Brush Prep: Now we're ready to build our last brush, the pattern brush. For our pattern brush, I'm going to use the bottom texture down here. But as you can see, the texture is not straight, it has some ups and downs and that's not going to be as easy to work with for texture. So I need to straighten it. In order to do that, I first need to copy and paste it onto its own layer so that I can work with that texture. I'm going to copy and paste and now it's on its own layer and I'm just going to turn off the background. The easiest way to adjust this so that it is straight is by using the puppet tool. So to find that, go under Edit and Puppet Warp. Zoom in, what you're seeing is, Photoshop is generating a mesh around your layer that you can manipulate. We have the expansion right now set to two pixels. So I'm going to turn the expansion up to 22 pixels, just so you can see what's happening. As you can see the mesh is expanding 22 pixels beyond my layer. Now, if all I had was the stroke and I didn't have the white box, that would be helpful so that you don't lose any of these semi-transparent pixels. But because I have all this white, I don't need any expansion. Then I'm just going to uncheck the Show Mesh that way it doesn't get in the way, then I'm going to zoom back out so I can see my entire texture and then I'm going to set a pin on each one of my ends. Then I'm going to bring down a ruler so that I can see what parts extend beyond or below my straight line. I'm going to hold command R bring down a ruler, I' going to set it right there to make that left point right on that pin. Then I'm going to press command colon on the keyboard to bring up my ruler guides, and then I need some more pins. This part up here it's an arch going on, so I'm going to put a pin in there, and I'm going to put a pin here. Let's just start with that and then we can always add more pins. Oops, that snapped to the guide so I'm going to put that up there a little bit. Now you can just click on your pins and use the arrow tools on your keyboard to nudge your texture down so that it's even on your guide. You can do that in all of your pins and you can also just click and drag too, if that's easier. This part right here looks like it's a little low, so I'm going to put the pin in there. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect, but once it's pretty close then we're ready to bring in the Illustrator. Just hit the check mark and now we can just make a selection of our texture again, copy and bring it into Illustrator by pasting. First things first we need to image trace our texture, let's bring up that panel and do some adjusting. Always make sure Ignore White is checked and then I like to uncheck Snap Curves To Lines. Now this texture do your best to get the anchor point count as small as possible, but still getting the text you want. Because this pattern is going to be repeated and if you have a bazillion points, Illustrator is just going to crash on you. Also keep in mind that this texture is going to work better for thin paths, like 1.5-10 paths works great on. At that size, you're not going to be seeing a ton of detail. So you can really just bring down the noise by moving the slider up and that gets rid of all those tiny little anchor points and tiny little spots that you're not going to notice anyway. I'm at 669 and I'm going to turn the paths down because there's a ton of little textures that we're not going to notice. I got rid of some texture up here, but at this size, you're going to be seeing this that will be really hard to notice. Then I'm just going to play around with the threshold a little bit more, right about there it looks pretty good. I got my anchors below 500 which is pretty good, what I usually try to shoot for and we're ready to expand it. At this point if there's any adjusting you want to do with these ends or anything, feel free to do that. I'm going to zoom in here and I don't really like this little nub that's happening, that's funky. I'm just going to get rid of that. Going back to Object, Path, Remove Anchor Points, and zoom in here, go to my Direct Selection Tool. I'm just going to bring that just down a little bit, so it's not so drastic, and I'm ready to start building the brush. 7. Making a Perfect Pattern Texture: The first thing we need to do for this brush is separate the end caps from the middle texture. Go over to your Tools panel, find your Rectangle tool, and then draw a box on the middle portion of your texture, and then select both your rectangle and your texture, and then go into your Pathfinder tool. I'll close this to clean up my workspace and then find my Pathfinder tool. Now I'm going to divide my shapes. I'll un-group everything by holding Shift Command G. I don't need the box anymore, so I'll delete that. Now these are all separated. Next, we want to resize our texture. I'm going to draw a one pixel line. So that you can see, I just drew a regular line that's what one pixel is and if we just left our texture at this size, this is what one pixel would be. We definitely want to make this smaller. Let's select our entire texture. We're going to resize that. I'm holding Shift to scale my texture proportionally. Let's make it a little smaller. This is why you don't need a ton of detail when you are image tracing your texture, because you're making it so much smaller. I think that looks pretty good. Let's zoom in. Here's my texture. Our next step is to make sure that this portion of our path where we split the layers, are completely centered up and down and this is really important because when the pattern brush starts repeating, you're going to notice if these areas are addressed right. I'm going to zoom in really close on this portion right here, where these two are cut, to make this easier so we can see the pass, I'm going to switch to outline mode so we can see all of our edges and all you need to do is hold Command Y to toggle into that mode, and then select our Lasso tool. I want to select these two joining points right here, and switch to the Direct Selection tool and make sure you're smart guys are enabled by pressing Command U on your keyboard, and then click and drag until it has that intersecting line. Because then you know those points are at the very top edge of the thickness of your path. Then we need to do the same thing with our last little down here. I'm going to select my points and then there's an extra point in here. I'm going to just de-select that point, and then drag these points and so now they're at the lowest point that my path ever goes. You can zoom out to double-check that actually is the lowest point. If you hold down Command on the keyboard, the bounding box of your texture appears in so you can see that there's no points beyond those points. Now that we know that these points are at the very top and bottom of our texture, we don't have to leave them there. We can scale them back down so our texture looks right, but then we'll know for sure that those points are centered up and down equally and then you won't notice any repeating of our texture. Let's zoom in nice and close. Select all those points. Press "S" for the Scale tool and we can bring those back in. If you want, you can modify any of the paths again if you want to make it so it doesn't look so funky, but this is going to be small, so you probably won't notice much. Let's go all the way to the right side, and zoom in and do the same thing here. To switch to my Lasso tool, select those two points and switch to my Direct Selection tool, and bring those up. Now don't make the mistake of thinking that this is as high as you need to go. This is snapping to another point, but not necessarily the highest point. I need to go a little further, right there. Then do the same thing on the bottom, and then we can make a selection of all those points, and scale it down with the Scale tool again, then zoom out. Then we can go out of outline mode by pressing Command Y on the keyboard, and there's our perfect texture, and now we're ready to start building the actual brush. 8. Building The Pattern Brush: The first thing we need to do is make the end portions of our texture into swatches. Make sure you have your Swatches panel open over here, then just select the left portion of your texture and drag it over here into the panel. Do the same thing for the right and other swatches. Then next, select the middle portion of your texture and make a new brush. This time we're making a pattern brush. All right, here's our pattern brush options. The middle portion has already been chosen for us since we had that selected in our document, and then this outer corner tile what we need to do is select "Auto-Between" and that way it'll generate corners for us using our texture. Then we're going to do the same thing for the inner corners, "Auto-Between" and now this is where our end caps go. This is left end cap and this one is our right. Then we're going to stretch to fit and then colorization, always using tints, and then click "Okay". Now our new brush is right down here in our pattern brush section. If I click this brush and apply our new pattern brush to it, there we go. Like I was saying before our brush is only repeated once and then stretches to fit your path. This pattern brush repeats your texture and only has to stretch to a certain point before it adds another sample. This works a lot better on long paths. 9. Saving Your Brushes: Hey. Now I'm going to show you a few things about our brushes panel. If you ever want to go back in and edit any of your scatter brushes up here, you can always just double-click, you can name it, you can adjust it, do whatever you want to do. That's the same for our art brushes and our pattern brush. All the other brushes in this panel are all the default brushes that automatically open with any new Illustrator file, and the brushes that we created are only saved with this document. If I were to go open up a new file, these brushes that we just made are not going to be in this brush panel. We need to make a new catalog so that we can load these brushes and they'll be here whenever we need them. I want to get rid of all the brushes that I didn't create. The basic one, Illustrator is not going to let us delete that one, but we can select the other ones and we can select multiple by holding command on the keyboard. Selecting all these, hitting the trash. This first one here, you can see Illustrator is not going to let us delete that one either. We can delete that one and that one. These two brushes, Illustrator is not going to let me delete. This brush if I click Delete, it tells me that one of my brushes is using a style and it cannot be deleted until the styles are deleted. If you go up here to Styles, these are also generated with every new document, so it's okay that we're deleting them. Now we can delete that brush. We're going to save our brushes by going down here on the left corner and saying, "Save brushes." You can name them whatever you want. I'm going to name mine jbtexture. I'm going to just put mine on the desktop, save it. Next time if you are to make a new document and you want to use these brushes, and they're not here, all you need to do is go to Other Library, and then wherever you decided to save it, click on your document, open, and you have your texture brushes right there. 10. Using Your Brushes: So now I want to show you how I use these texture brushes on my illustrations. So we're going to work on texturing this potted plant here. The first thing I'm going to do is apply our pattern brush to these strokes. Like this one here, I have my JB texture brushes loaded. Here's our pattern brush. I'll just apply that. Let's zoom in so we can see. There it is. Now that looks a lot more sketchy than just the regular path. Then I'm going to do the same thing for these paths down here and apply it. Then I'm actually going to increase the point size to about two pixels. So now we have the path on our artwork textured. Now, let's say I want to add some texture on the pink pot. The brush we're going to use for that is our statter brush. So just select your paint brush tool and then just do a quick little swipe of your texture. Doesn't have to be anything fancy and then I'm going to increase the size to about two, position it where I want it and then I also want to change the color to be this red color down here. So I'm going to press I the keyboard and then also hold Shift so that it applies it to the stroke and not the fill. So now, I need to mask off that texture so that you don't see it extending beyond the pink pot. So how I do that is I just select my pink pot, copy it by holding Command C and then paste in front by pressing Command F on the keyboard. Now I want to bring this to the front. So I press Command Shift and the right bracket on the keyboard. So it goes all the way in front of all my layers. Then I hold Shift to select my path and then I need to mask it by pressing Command 7. There we go. You can do the same thing if you want to add some shading and texture on the leaves up here. Another option, if you want to add texture to the edges of a shape instead of just a path, you can always just add a stroke that's the same color and the easiest way to do that is go over here to your colors and drag it onto the stroke. So add a stroke of the same color and then apply your pattern brush to it. I'm going to increase my point size to 1.5 pixels. Then that will just add some roughness. Then let's just add that same texture and stroke to all of my leaves. I'll press I on the keyboard to get my eye dropper tool and we'll just sample that. Now the edges are nice and rough and you can play around with that, add more texture, different edges, whatever you want to do, it really add some fun texture to your illustrations. 11. Thanks!: All right. Guys. That's the end of our class. Thank you so much for signing up and taking it. I hope you had a lot of fun. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them on the Community Page and I'll be happy to help you out. Be sure to make a class project and post your final brush textures and your final illustration. If you're feeling generous, you can even share your brushes with all the other students. If you post a project on Instagram, be sure to tag me @jamiebartlettdesign so I can see your work there. If you liked this class, make sure to follow me on Skillshare so that every time I post a new class, you'll be updated. Thanks again guys, and I'll see you next time.