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About this lesson
How to create, save, and load your own Illustrator brushes.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Custom Brushes - Instructions.docx59 KB Custom Brushes - Exercise.ai
19.1 MB Custom Brushes - Exercise Solution.ai
76.3 MB
Quick reference
Custom Brushes
How to create, save, and load your own Illustrator brushes.
When to use
Custom Brushes can be useful anytime that you want to add some personality to an otherwise boring looking stroke or line. You can also use custom brushes to create custom borders.
Instructions
- Begin by opening the 'Custom Brushes - Exercise.ai' file.
- Open the Brushes Panel on the right side of the Illustrator interface.
- Once the panel is open, click on the hamburger menu on the upper right corner to reveal the dropdown menu.
- From the menu that appears choose 'Open Brush Library' and then select 'Other Library...' from the bottom.
- Navigate to the 'GoSkills_Custom_Brushes.ai' file to load the custom brushes.
- You should be able to move the panel with your custom brushes freely around the workspace.
- Switch over to the Pen Tool and choose a black stroke, with none for the fill color.
- Click with the Pen Tool to create a point, and then create a second and third point (it can be straight or curved.)
- Once you have created a few lines, apply some of the custom brushes to them to try them out.
Hints
- You can double click on any of your preset or custom brushes to experiment with some of the options shown in the video.
- You can create art brushes, scatter brushes, or pattern brushes depending on what you want to use them for.
- After you apply a brush to a stroke, you can still modify the line that it is applied to by selecting any of the points or handles with the Direct Selection Tool (A).
Login to download
- 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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