Hey everyone, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we are going to be tackling
the Brush tool and the Blob Brush tool.
So let's go ahead and get started.
First hit V to get your paintbrush.
Now paintbrushes paint with whatever stroke color you have.
So we'll choose a kind of reddish one.
And I'm just going to kind of drag a line like this.
And my smoothness is turned up pretty well, so it wants to smooth out my line for me which
is awesome because I'm not very good at drawing a smooth line.
But if you want to change that, if you know exactly what you want and you want it to follow
your line, your jagged line, very perfectly, you'll want to change your settings.
And to do that, we'll just go into the Brush and double click, and here is where you can
change this.
Now, I almost always keep my eye on the smoothest setting possible, because I very rarely need
to make very specific edges that I definitely want.
I always want it to smooth it out.
But if you go all the way down here to 'accurate', it is going to keep every little thing that
you do.
That works too.
So just set this however you want for you.
If you have this checked 'Edit Selected Paths', you can hit your V tool and click a path,
and then hit B for your brush and you can continue that shape.
You just have to kind of start right on it like this, and it'll allow you to continue
it.
Now if I hit CMD Y, we can see the wireframe of what we've just done.
You can see that it's all one piece.
So hit CMD Y again to get it back to the regular view.
Alright, so there are a few different things you can do with brushes, and a lot of them
are really cool.
You can actually make your own brushes, and we'll do that quickly.
There's a lot of different options there.
And we're not going to cover everything, but I do want to show you what the Brush Libraries
are like.
So let's go ahead and open a Brush Library.
Go to Brushes.
If you don't have that open, you can go to Window>Brushes.
And we'll do this little drop down and go to Open>Brush Library.
And we'll open up the artistic one.
So we'll go to calligraphic.
But if we grab a calligraphic brush, maybe this 30 here, I'll show you what happens.
You basically have a pen where you can draw just like you would.
I am not the greatest calligrapher in the world...still working on that, but the option
is there.
So that's cool.
If we hit the right arrow button down here, it'll load the next Brush Library.
And then you can really play around with some crazy artistic brushes.
When you have a brush selected, you can also come over here to your stroke and make it
smaller or bigger.
You can knock it all the way down to .1 if you want and make it really thin like this,
or you can make it as big as you want, of course.
So we'll put it up at 12, and now we almost have a texture going on.
You can definitely play around with that.
These are some little wispy textures.
There are a lot of little ones like this that, you know, I guess could be helpful someday.
I have never used any of them, to be honest with you...
not these.
I can see where they could come in handy, I suppose.
If we keep going, we can see all the brushes that they offer.
Let's try one of these.
I'm not crazy about that.
Ok.
But anyway, you can go through and mess with some of those.
Here's a Scribble brush.
That one does some really cool effects.
Let's go ahead and apply this one to type.
So I'm going to type 'brush.'
And we'll make this Oswald font - that's free.
It's a Google font.
And I'll increase the size a little bit, and then I'm going to hit SHIFT CMD and O, to
outline the text.
So now this is a shape instead of live text.
You can also go to 'Type' and create outlines that way.
Now this means you won't be able to retype in that area again.
You would have to start a new text path, just type it out again.
Another option would be before doing this to copy something similar off to the side
so that you would always have the live text path, and I really recommend doing that.
Okay, we have our path now.
Let's apply this crazy brush to it.
All right, it is too big, and it will not allow us to see what's going on at all.
Let me just select this, and we'll go to the stroke and see if we can knock it down to
.1 . Okay, that almost looks hairy now, which is kind of a cool effect.
If you want just one of your texts to look hairy, you could leave it with a fill like
I did here.
Or we can get rid of the fill or fill it with white.
Let's fill it with white... pull up my swatches.
This is a pretty cool effect.
If you're wanting to have a really interesting headline or something like that, this would
work pretty well.
So I highly recommend just applying different brushes to your text or your artwork just
to see what happens.
If you wanted to do this one, you'd probably want a Group Selection tool, draw a box around
these, and then just move them apart a little bit so that they aren't touching so much.
But yeah, it's pretty cool, all the things that you can do with brushes.
Ok, before we switch over to the Blob Brush, which is very similar to the brush, but the
lines are made differently by Illustrator, and that's really the main difference.
And you can't use all these cool effects on them.
You can, but it won't be part of the Blob Brush itself, if that makes sense.
I do want to show you quickly how to create your own brush.
So open up your Brushes Palette.
That one again was under Window and it's Brushes.
And I'm going to just draw a circle here.
We'll do a circle...
I'm going to fill it.
I'm going to hit D (a white fill and a black outline).
Then we'll make a copy of it.
And we'll just do something like this.
Ok.
So select all of that.
And then you can just drag it over to your brushes.
And there are a lot of different brush types, but the one I use the most is the Pattern
Brush.
So we'll just say, 'Ok,' and it'll show you what is going to happen with that brush.
You can add spacing, if you want to see more space in between them.
I'm going to do that.
Maybe we'll do 80%.
Nah, we'll knock it back down, I'd like it at a 10.
Now if you want to go and have them actually overlap, you have to change that in a different
setting.
You can also see what it looks like when you click these different buttons: Flip Across,
Flip Along, Add Space to Fit.
And this is mostly what is happening when it's going around a corner or, you know, warping
to follow the path.
You can also set the coloration here, but I'm going to leave that at none, and we'll
say, Ok.
All right, now, I'm going to CMD- to zoom out, and we'll grab one of these letters.
And I will go ahead and apply our new brush to it.
Oh man, it's really huge.
So let's knock it down to .25, and now you can see the brush that you just made.
It has some problems on the corners and you have to mess with it to fix that, or you could
also just round the corners like this with the Pencil tool, and that'll help a little
bit.
Ok, so let's move on to the Blob Brush.
To get to the Blob Brush, you can hit SHIFT B, or you can come right over here.
Let's get a new swatch.
We'll have orange this time.
I'm going to CMD- to zoom out.
And now I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger, and I'm doing this by hitting
the ] button.
Now when I paint, it looks very similar to my other lines.
But watch this when I hit CMD Y, you can see the difference here.
This is the Brush tool, and this is the Blob Brush.
The Blob Brush just kind of merges all the shapes together.
And this is editable now in the way that normal paths are, but would definitely have a different
result than if you edited this one.
So if you were to use the Pencil tool and start on a path and then vary and then end
up on the path, here's what would happen.
Whereas if we did this down here, I start on the path and end up on the path.
It's actually going to change the whole path.
That is the difference between the Blob Brush and the regular paintbrush.
So I'm going to hit SHIFT V to get back to the Blob Brush.
And I'm going to double click on this, and you have most of the same selection options
that you have with a paintbrush.
You can make it more smooth or more accurate.
You can set your size, and if you have a pressure tablet, you have the pressure work as part
of your size.
So I'm going to put it at 17.
So this is going to be a size 17 brush with a variation of 17 also.
So we'll say, 'Ok'.
I'll show you what this can look like.
I also put a little bit of roundness pressure on this.
So you can see what happens.
I'm pushing down just a little and it is getting bigger and bigger as I press harder.
And so you can get a lot of cool effects if you have a tablet, if you can just get used
to them.
That is the hard part.
It took me about a week, I think.
Alright, so that is the Paintbrush tool and the Blob Brush.
Please let me know if you're having trouble with any of these.
I do want to mention that when you first get to your Brushes palette and you hit B. Sometimes
you cannot paint like this.
It won't let you, and usually the reason is, you don't have one of the brushes selected.
So just choose one, and then you should be able to paint with your paintbrush perfectly.
All right, thanks everyone!!
I will see you next week.