Custom Brushes

Quick reference

• 00:04 Now that you've had the chance to take a look at some of the preset brushes I'd
• 00:07 like to show you guys how you can use custom brushes in Adobe Illustrator.
• 00:11 Inside of the custom brushes before AI file I'm going to open up
• 00:15 the layers palate.
• 00:16 You'll see that I have a layer here called brush base which I'm just going to
• 00:19 toggle the visibility of that layer on for a second.
• 00:23 And on layer one we have nothing so on this first layer,
• 00:26 I'm just gonna grab my pen tool and I'm going to create a basic curved path.
• 00:31 I'm clicking and dragging, basically creating the curve and letting go.
• 00:36 Now I want to make sure that I deselect this so I'm going to press command, shift,
• 00:40 A and then I will select it again, toggle between my fill in
• 00:44 stroke by pressing X and choosing none for the fill colors.
• 00:47 That way all we have is a black line.
• 00:50 Now the next thing I want to do is open up my brushes panel over here on
• 00:53 the right side.
• 00:54 And now I can select this arrow, which is basically just a vector shape, and
• 00:58 I can literally click and drag it and drop it over here into my brushes panel.
• 01:02 And then you'll see this new pop up here that says new brush.
• 01:06 So we're gonna select art brush.
• 01:08 And hit ok.
• 01:10 And then for now I'm just going to call this arrow brush 1 and hit OK.
• 01:17 So now, you'll see that I have my newly created brush, arrow brush 1.
• 01:21 And if I select my line I can apply this brush to it.
• 01:27 Let's just go ahead a double click on this arrow brush for a second so that I can
• 01:29 show you guys some of these settings and get a little bit of a better look at them.
• 01:35 Now one of the things you can do here is to scale it proportionally
• 01:38 which is going to make the whole thing even and equal in weight.
• 01:41 Which we don't really want.
• 01:43 This is what it was set to by default, stretch to fit stroke length,
• 01:46 which looks okay but it really kinda stretches everything out.
• 01:50 But then we have this other option here called stretch between guides.
• 01:53 And as soon as I click that you can tell that there's a dashed line appears
• 01:56 on the top and the bottom of our graphic.
• 01:59 So if I click and I drag this dashed line down which is our top guide
• 02:04 It's basically going to say, stretch everything between these two guides.
• 02:09 And this top part will remain mostly intact.
• 02:13 So now when I look at this, the only part that's really getting stretched is
• 02:16 the bottom between these two, and then the arrow just kind of serves as a cap on
• 02:20 the end, which is more inline with what we want.
• 02:23 But you can also kind of set these options specifically by using these numbers
• 02:27 here to modify the areas that you want to say to stretch.
• 02:33 And you can also flip these things to flip it vertically or horizontally okay?
• 02:39 And you've got a few more options up here where you can adjust the width
• 02:43 of your brush.
• 02:45 And if I click on that drop down menu you'll see that there's a few other
• 02:48 options here such as pressure, stylus wheel, tilt, bearing and rotation.
• 02:53 And some of these options are more specific to people who are using a stylus
• 02:57 or like a tablet.
• 02:59 So we don't have to worry about that for right now.
• 03:01 I'm just going to leave this brush as is and hit OK.
• 03:05 Now it's going to say that brush is in use.
• 03:06 Do you want to apply the changes to the existing brush strokes or
• 03:09 leave the strokes as they are and create a new copy of the brush.
• 03:13 For this I'm going to say Apply to Strokes and
• 03:15 that will pretty much overwrite the settings that we had used previously.
• 03:19 So that's one way that you can create a custom art brush from a vector or
• 03:23 a shape Now, another type of brush that you can create is from an image.
• 03:27 And this is something that is fairly new to Adobe Illustrator.
• 03:33 So if I press P on the keyboard and creating another line or
• 03:37 another stroke here, I'm just going to go ahead and
• 03:40 make the same thing that we started with previously.
• 03:44 Just the black line.
• 03:45 So I'm gonna select it press x and choose none for the fill so
• 03:48 that all I have is black stroke.
• 03:52 Now this time I'm going to select my image.
• 03:54 Click and drag it over here and this time let's choose scatter brush.
• 03:59 Once I hit OK you'll see this dialog box appear and
• 04:02 I'll call it wood scatter brush 1 and hit OK.
• 04:09 So now if I select my line.
• 04:11 And I apply this wooden scatter brush to it,
• 04:14 you'll see that it's now kind of repeating this brush from start to finish.
• 04:20 So let's double click on that and
• 04:21 we can kind of see what some of these settings do here.
• 04:24 I'm gonna check off this box that says preview.
• 04:27 And then we can toggle things like the size.
• 04:30 The spacing.
• 04:32 If we want it to overlap or decrease the spacing to create more copies.
• 04:37 Or we can spread it out to create a greater distance in between them.
• 04:42 We also have control over that as well.
• 04:45 And for the scatter, you can kind of do the same thing,
• 04:47 where you're choosing how much or how little you want to scatter this.
• 04:54 Okay, and you also have control over the rotation because it's a scatter brush, so
• 04:58 you get some slightly different settings.
• 05:00 And you can say, if you want your rotation relative to the page or to the path.
• 05:05 Which means if it's to the page its just going to go from left to right but if it's
• 05:10 to the path it's going to follow more to the direction of the line that we created.
• 05:15 Now you have some other options in here as well where you can choose things like
• 05:19 tints, tintsand shades, and hue shift.
• 05:23 I think for now we'll probably leave it on either none or
• 05:26 tints, and then just hit, OK.
• 05:28 And for this part, we'll go and say apply to strokes.
• 05:34 So this another kind of brush that you can use and
• 05:37 you can actually create art brushes from images as well.
• 05:40 But I just wanted to show you guys a few of the different approaches that you can
• 05:43 take to creating custom brushes.
• 05:46 Now another thing that you could do is create kind of an outline or
• 05:51 just a basic shape like this.
• 05:53 And if I come over here to my stroke panel and let's say I make this around 10 or
• 05:58 so and open up my brushes,
• 06:01 I can drag this shape over to the brushes panel and create a pattern brush.
• 06:08 Now this is going to ask me where I want to use these shapes.
• 06:12 And you can see under here we have these guides that are saying,
• 06:15 what do you want to use in the top left corner, or
• 06:17 what do you want to use as a connecting piece, and corner pieces and so forth.
• 06:23 So I can choose some of these other options here to auto overlap and
• 06:29 I can leave some of these other ones the end tile and start tiles to none.
• 06:36 Okay and then from there I'm just going to call this diamond pattern one.
• 06:42 And just choose OK.
• 06:44 So now, I just create a box,
• 06:48 I can apply my new custom pattern brush and scale it up and down
• 06:55 or if I had kind of a longer shape that wasn't a closed shape,
• 07:00 we can kinda see how that looks using a corner piece.
• 07:05 See here it's getting kinda stretched out and
• 07:08 skewed but you can do a lot with these few custom brushes here.
• 07:14 Ideally you would wanna have a separate shape for the corners.
• 07:18 So let me show you what I mean.
• 07:21 If I create another box and change the weight to say seven or eight, and
• 07:25 rotate it 90 degrees by holding the shift key and
• 07:27 then rotate it, I can press Cmd+C then Cmd+F to paste the copy in front.
• 07:33 I'm just going to press shift and
• 07:35 the option key as I drag outwards to create another copy.
• 07:39 Scaled from the center.
• 07:41 Now for this other copy,
• 07:42 I'm gonna change the weight to something a little bit heavier like 12.
• 07:45 Now I can select both of these together,
• 07:49 come back to my brushes and drag this over here as a new shape.
• 07:53 We'll call this our next add-on brush.
• 07:58 So, for now we can choose what we want our corner to look like.
• 08:03 Let's say that we want the corner to be auto between and see how that looks.
• 08:08 It'll give you a little preview of that here.
• 08:11 Okay, so we can kinda use this to put together a preview of our brushes.
• 08:16 I think this looks pretty cool.
• 08:18 You also have the option to choose what you want for these kind of corners or
• 08:22 middle pieces where you're going from one direction to the other.
• 08:27 And you just wanna have some shapes or some different shapes for each of these
• 08:31 but again you can play around with things like the spacing and so forth as well.
• 08:36 So for now let's go ahead and hit okay once again.
• 08:40 Now if I just create another box and apply this brush,
• 08:45 you'll see that you get a very different looking result.
• 08:48 And that's because of the way that we've specified our brush settings.
• 08:54 So let's see how this same brush looks on kind of a longer shape or a longer path.
• 09:01 I click over here, hold down the shift key to create a straight line, and
• 09:04 hold down shift again to create a 90 degree angle.
• 09:07 I can apply this brush and you will now see that you have primary shapes and
• 09:11 then our corner shapes.
• 09:13 And there's also a smaller diamond shape here on the bottom.
• 09:19 And as I scale this and move it around, you can see how those shapes are changing.
• 09:25 So there are a few different types of brushes that you can create here.
• 09:28 Just using some basic shapes, and you can also use images as well to create
• 09:32 art brushes, scatter brushes or pattern brushes.
• 09:36 And once you're happy with your brushes that you have,
• 09:39 you have the ability to come over here to the top right of the brushes panel and
• 09:43 you can actually save your brush library.
• 09:46 So let's say I had some custom brushes that I was happy with, I could actually
• 09:51 save those out externally so, that way, if I were to create a new file,
• 09:58 I can come back to my brushes panel Choose open brush library.
• 10:02 Other library.
• 10:03 And then navigate to my brushes and load them up.
• 10:08 And here I will have all of my custom brushes so
• 10:12 that way, if I just use a normal brush, I can select it and
• 10:17 apply any of these brushes to it with my option save.
• 10:24 So those are just some of the things that you can do,
• 10:27 very basic things that you can do with custom brushes in Adobe Illustrator.

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