Lessons

Lesson Info

Calligraphic Brushes

So learning the brushes, we have to learn about the Brush tool itself. So the Brush tool, letter B is in the toolbar. And as you start to use the Brush tool, I've chosen a color and a stroke weight that I would like to create my brush. And I'd be able to go in and paint and create a smooth brush. Double click on the brush tool on the toolbar to call up the paint brush tool options. Now we have the ability to make a very accurate Brush tool, or we can slide this all the way over to smooth. Well accurate when we're doing something with our brush. If we have very deliberate actions, this will create a very deliberate and very accurate representation of what we're doing with our mouse or our pen, or our stylus. If I double click on the brush tool and I set this to smooth, then when I try to paint something, if I have kind of jerky motions, this will try to smooth it out and create a much more smooth style of my brush. Either way, whatever you want to create, make sure you have those settin...

gs. Now those settings will not be able to be applied retroactively. I can't go in and take this previous one drawn with accurate, double click on my brush tool and say, "Okay, I want it smooth." That's not how it works. This, you set the preferences for the tool. It won't go back and it won't edit these. So I mean remove those and let's talk about some other options here when I double click on my brush tool. When I go through, I have the ability to edit my selected paths. And what does that mean? Well, this could be interesting and this could be slightly frustrating too if you don't know what this is. So with the edit selected paths, I'm gonna take my brush and I'm going to paint. Now, I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna select that brush shape that I just created, I'm gonna select it. Go back to your selection tool, click on that and then go back to your brush. Edit the selected paths allow you to go back to your brush and go back to your selected path here and click anywhere along the path and basically change the direction of it. In fact, edit it. Now that could be kind of nice, so you don't have to go and delete or remove or erase sections of that path. But what could also be annoying too is if you wanna go back in and you wanna add some items to your creation here, but is selected. If your path is selected and you do something like this, you will change the direction of it. If your path isn't selected, then you can add anything that you want to, to your path. If you do wanna edit your selected paths and you say keep selected, that means that when you let go of the brush tool, it'll be selected and then you can edit. I usually turn those off 'cause I don't find that, that's how I create things by going in and editing what I've already done. So those are my basic settings. Now, as I go through, let's talk about our Touch Calligraphic tool. What does that actually mean? Well, the Touch Calligraphic tool is just simply the default brush when we start to use the brush. Now what's unique about the Touch Calligraphic tool is that you can simply go in and you can paint using the brush. And now you see that all of these are also calligraphic brushes but these have very specific settings to them, size, rotation and angle. But the Touch Calligraphic tool just simply gives me a circle. And here's a nice trick. If I'd like to paint with a larger brush or a smaller brush, I'm gonna use the right bracket on my keyboard to make this much larger, okay. And you notice I'm not changing the stroke weight here, I'm just taking the brush tool and I'm making it larger. So large brush, that works. If I wanna make a smaller brush, I simply use my left bracket and I reduce it down in size. Now, getting into the actual settings if you want to create a calligraphic brush, go to the brushes drop down menu, choose new brush. Now you'll notice some of these are grayed out. And the reason why these are grayed out is because the scatter and the art brush require you to create artwork first and then turn that artwork into a brush. Whereas the calligraphic bristle and pattern brushes don't require you to create something before, you can create it in the next dialogue box once you choose the type of brush and click Okay. Here we have our calligraphic brush, what can we do with this? Many different things. We have our circle. This is our brush shape editor, and we can turn and we can also pinch this roundness and it gives me a preview of what exactly this is gonna look like. Now when we're doing a calligraphic brush, if you've ever done calligraphy there, we usually use a chisel tip. Which allows us to have or hold the pen at an angle and get kind of this angular tip so that when we do a horizontal stroke, we get it wide and we do more of a vertical stroke, we go along the axis of our shape. So here we can change the rotation or the access and we can also can change how thick and thin this is. We can control the overall size of this as well so we can have a larger or smaller calligraphic brush. And you can see that there's already different size calligraphic brushes created, but this allows us to go in and create a specific size as we go. There it is. Now we're gonna come back and revisit this because what I want to do here is I wanna talk about all these options here, fixed, random, pressure, stylus, everything else. But for now, let's just go in and create our calligraphic brush here. And you can name this whatever you want. I'm going to do 20 point chisel so that we have some kind of idea what this is in our brushes panel. So there's our 20 point chisel. And how does this work? Well, just like any other chisel tip, I can come in here, I can do my calligraphy and thank goodness for that smoothing that I have on there. Because sometimes when you're working with a tablet or your mouse, it doesn't create the most smooth transitions. Now I'm gonna go in and I wanna edit this brush because I realize that I'd like to make this little thinner to get the more dramatic thicks and thins. I'm gonna double click on my existing brush in the brushes panel and I'm going to make this even narrower but I'm also going to make it larger, okay. And I can see how that's gonna work and I click Okay. Now here's something interesting. It says this brush is in use, meaning you've applied this basic brush to some certain strokes. Do you wanna go ahead and do you wanna see those results by applying your changes to the strokes? So if I say apply to strokes, it's now going to go again and it's going to apply it to those strokes that I've already done. And then whenever I create new ones here, now I can see how that chisel is going to work for me. That's what I can do. So again, double click, change any of these attributes as you go through and click Okay. Apply to the existing strokes and you can see that change happens immediately. So you don't have to go back and recreate your artwork, which is nice and interesting. Now I'm gonna clear all this content out of the way because I just wanna run through some of the basic calligraphic strokes that we have. This one just happens to be a round stroke. So I give you an idea, that's a five point round, okay. Here's a 15 point round here. There's a 3.5 point, oh, well there's a five point flat made completely flat so we can get kind of like this ribbon effect. Now what's interesting with this is that you can also use this right bracket or left bracket to increase the size of the resulting brush. I noticed that my five point flat chisel here isn't quite enough. So if I went in and I edited my five point flat chisel and I change it, it's gonna change every place that I've applied that to it. But if I use my right bracket and I actually increase the brush size here and I go and I use that exact same five point flat and I do this here, this gives me the variation of the size, but keeping all the other attributes the same without having to edit this and change the size. So again, right bracket makes that brush larger, left bracket makes it smaller and beautiful. But now if I were to change the attributes of this particular one here and decide that I'm going to maybe angle this a little bit more, I could see what's going on by clicking the preview button and it's going to show what's happening. Now, when I do that however and I apply this to the strokes, you'll notice that I lose that variation in there. And that variation that I went and I changed the size of my brush. So that's something that you have to be careful of. But, if you do like the brush and you'd like to use it in varying weights, you don't have to create multiple brushes. Right bracket will make the cursor larger and left bracket will make the cursor smaller all by keeping those basic attributes. That's something that I find to be extremely helpful when you're going and creating these brushes 'cause you wouldn't wanna create 30 different brushes and make sure you select the absolute perfect brush. And now you don't have to. Now let's talk about other issues that come up with creating these new brushes. I'm gonna go into the brush dropdown menu, gonna create a new calligraphic brush. And with this calligraphic brush, I'm going to flatten the roundness. I'm going to do the rotation here, and now let's talk about these drop down menus. I don't have to have the angle roundness and size consistent. I can have them fixed or I could have them random which means as I begin to draw, I can randomly control the variation of the angle. A variation of nothing means that the angle's gonna stay the same. But if I bump up the variation to say like 35% as I go and I create this angle what's gonna happen is as I'm drawing here, the angle's gonna vary in about 35% here. 35% variation, I'm gonna click Okay. Now you'll notice we have no preview button here. You'll never have a preview button when you're creating a new brush. That preview button will only show up when you're editing an existing brush. Just a little tip. With the angle set to random, I'm going to take this calligraphic brush here and there's my calligraphic brush, grab my brush. And I'm gonna go in and the angle's going to change. And you can't really see the change of the angle here, but if I were to go in and I would randomly paint, you could see here how it randomly changes. Could that be of use? Yeah, 'cause you could get varying thicknesses and thinness is as you go along there. Okay, that could be a possible help. I'm gonna double click on this brush again and I'm going to edit this brush. Now we can do the roundness. So right now I have a very flat brush. And if I do a random bit of roundness here and set the variation, I will get very flat and I will get very round. It won't let me go ahead and do the variation past the amount of roundness here. And that could be interesting. And I could also set the size to be random as well. So I could make it larger and smaller as I create. Okay, that could be quite interesting. I'm actually going to, oh, I clicked on the angle there. Let me just, I'm gonna fatten up this brush a little bit and now I'm gonna show you how this works. Now it's asking me if I wanna apply these changes to my existing stroke because I had already created this and I had created artwork, it wants to apply this to the strokes, which I'll do. So now I wanna show you what this would look like in random. And what I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna just draw here, I'm simply going to click and you can see how it gives me those random size, shapes and rotations. And this is just click, click, click, click, click. Now, if I paint here and do this, this could kind of give me a little bit different effect. Now you don't see it as well when you simply use this as a brush and you flow, but you can see some slight variations in the thinness and the thickness here. Probably more so when you start doing your verticals and horizontals, coming through here you may see that variation. But definitely not as much as just going in and using kind of the staccato effect. Now, another unique feature that you can use with several of these brushes. You'll notice that when we go to these menus here, these items are grayed out. If you have a tablet with a stylus, what you can then do is you can control this via the pressure or the tilt of your stylus and all of these things can be changed. And this could be incredibly cool when you're going in and creating brushes, especially when you want to go and do the roundness. There's certain illustrators out there that use this variation in line weight to make an exceptionally cool looking line around any shape or anything that they draw. And that pressure could be cool, 'cause the pressure of the stylus can make it more or less round or you can change the size. So if you plug in your stylus, you'll see that some of these will definitely come up as more options. Now the more advanced stylus pens that we have out there, we'll actually be controlled by tilt as well. So if you have a more aggressive angle, they may change in size or less aggressive angle, they'll reduce in size, but the pressure could be very cool. But not everybody has a tablet with that. But I encourage you to try that out because it can be very, very, very interesting. And it's not something that if you're a traditional illustrator by using different methods of pen and pencil or ink, it's not as easy to come up with and that's one of the things that the computer really helps you with. So I'm gonna cancel out of this and now we have our basic sets of calligraphic brushes. If you like a certain brush and you'd like to keep it but you would like to change a certain attribute, you can always select that brush in the brushes panel, go under the brush down menu and choose duplicate the brush. At that point, you can then go in and you can then get a copy of that, change the attributes or change a single attribute and go from there. Now one more thing that I'd like to show you here is, I'm gonna select just a basic brush stroke that I've applied. I'm gonna go under the dropdown menu here and I'm gonna talk about the options of selected object. Now that's options of selected object. What they allow you to do is they allow you to go in here and choose a preview and allow you to basically change the attributes of this particular shape. So maybe I like what I've done but I would just like to get a little bit more bevel out of this, or I'd like to get a little less roundness out of it too, then I can click Okay. And you'll notice that I'm not changing every place where this brush was applied. And if I did edit this brush, it would change all of the items that were applied to it. Yet if I select this shape and go to the dropdown menu and choose the options for the selected object, I can then go in and edit the characteristics of how this brush was applied to this shape only.