Lesson Info
2. Intro to Brushes in Illustrator
Lessons
Intro from Jason
01:16 2Intro to Brushes in Illustrator
05:11 3Calligraphic Brushes
16:08 4Scatter Brushes
16:44 5Art Brushes
15:13 6Bristle Brushes
06:40 7Pattern Brushes
14:20 8Brush Libraries
04:33Lesson Info
Intro to Brushes in Illustrator
Welcome to brushes and Illustrator. I'm Jason and I'm here to walk you through the brushes panel and the different styles of brushes that we have available for use in Illustrator. To talk about the brushes, let's call up our brush panel. Under the window menu, go down to brushes and up comes the brushes panel. When we go under the brushes drop down menu, there are five different types of brushes, calligraphic, scatter, art, bristle, and pattern brushes. These are five different brushes that we can create on our own. We can make anything and turn into a brush and we can use these with several different options. Now what's interesting about a brush is that you don't need to use the brush tool in order to use the brushes panel. You certainly can, but you can also simply create any shape, like I've done here, with rectangles, and go through and apply the different style brushes to the stroke of an object. So whether you create that stroke by using the pencil tool, by using the pen tool, by...
drawing with the shape or using the brush tool, you'll be able to apply these brushes to the outline or the stroke of any object, whether it's opened or closed. Now, I showed you five different types of brushes that we have here but I have six different objects. Why is that? Well, it's quite interesting because when we start off with any shape whatsoever, we start off with an object that has a basic stroke on it. And going up to the control bar here, if you don't see the control bar, make sure that that's on by going under the window and checking control. When we draw a basic shape and we apply a stroke to that shape and a stroke weight, you'll see this dropdown that says uniform which is the width profile of the line that you've created, and then basic. Well basic and uniform simply means that there is no brush applied to this object, even though the word basic shows up here in the brushes here, what this means is the default. It basically means it's clear to brushes. And you may be asking, okay, so why is it in the brushes panel? Well, this is one way that you can basically say, okay, I wanna clear any brush effect off my object. So uniform and basic is something that you're going to get whenever you draw anything and apply a stroke to any shape whatsoever. And if you apply a color and a stroke weight, you'll always see uniform and basic. That's just telling you that what you get is, in this case, a black three point stroke on the line or the shape that you're drawing. No brushes, okay? It basically is a basic line. Even though it's in the brushes panel. I know, but it's a very quick way to say, you know what? I don't want any brushes applied, cause really, there's only five. Now a better way to actually view the brushes panel is this. Going to the brushes drop down menu, changing this from thumbnail view to list view. I can now see the different styles of brush based on the icons here. So we can see the scatter brush. We can see the calligraphic brush. We can see our art brushes. We can see all the different types of brushes by the little symbol right here. So again, if we want a calligraphic brush, this is what we see here. Scatter is right here. This is going to be an art brush. This is a bristle brush and this is a pattern brush. I like to use it this way because it's much easier for me to see this because when I look at a set of brushes here, you really can't tell by the thumbnail view if this is an art brush or a scatter brush or a standard brush, I just don't know. So here, view it as a list view and there we have it. So what I've done is I've simply created some shapes and I've applied a brush stroke to it. Now these are the default strokes, but we are gonna go in and we're gonna create our on brushes and show the options, show you the differences and some of the little speed bumps that we may run into. So when I select my object and I select my stroke, going up into the control bar here, I can access my brush panel. It's identical to the brush panel over here and I can simply apply any of these styles to my shape, whatever it may be, okay? Opened or closed shape, line or circle, makes no difference. And it doesn't make any difference how you create those shapes. The pen tool, the pencil tool, the brush tool, or any of your shape tools. It's all just a stroke. And that's where the brushes get applied to. So come on along and I'm gonna walk you through each and every one of these brushes, what they can do, how to make them and make your artwork look simply amazing with the addition of brushes.
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Ratings and Reviews
Angie redpolkadot
Illustrator is my favorite Adobe product, and I have been using it for a while, but I still learned so much watching this webinar. And Jason's teaching style is pleasant to listen to, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
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Adobe Illustrator