Hi everyone, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about
how to make a watercolor brush in Adobe Illustrator cc 2019.
And for this tutorial, you'll need to already have your watercolor artwork on a transparent
background.
And if you don't know how to do that, there's a link in the description, and you can just
check out another video for that.
OK, let's get started.
OK, so first we'll want to get a watercolor texture with no background.
And there's one that I found online, and I've put this link in the description, so you can
just head over here and use this one, or you can use your own.
So I'm going to click 'Free Download' here, and we'll just wait.
We have to wait a few seconds and then download PNG.
This is going to my Downloads.
So I'm going to click on my Illustrator icon and go to File>Place.
I'll hit OPT CMD L, which will take me straight to my downloads, and change my 'Date Modified'
to today and choose this 'NicePng'.
So I'll just place this here.
A good rule of thumb is to make this about an inch or so.
So I'm going to get my rulers up by hitting CMD R, and then I'll CTRL click on them and
change this to 'Inches'.
So the edge of it right here is right where the two is.
So I'm going to make this quite a bit smaller...a little bit smaller.
So now it's right at about an inch if I put it over here at zero.
And it's a little bit bigger.
OK.
So now that you've done that, go to Object>Rasterize and click 'Transparent'.
Your resolution should be at 300.
And you'll probably see that this says CMYK, but let's 'Cancel' and change our 'Document
Color Mode' to RGB.
That'll help it be a little brighter.
And since this is probably going to be used on the web, we want RGB.
OK, so let's go back up to Object>Rasterize.
And now you'll notice it's changed to RGB.
Resolution is 300, and we'll choose 'Transparent' for the transparent background.
And we'll say 'OK'.
I'm going to zoom in on this a little bit.
And now let's go to our 'Brushes' palette.
If this isn't already open, you can go to Window and >Brushes right here.
I'm going to 'Select All Unused' and delete those.
With this still selected, we're going to click the 'New Brush' icon, and we'll choose 'Art
Brush'.
In here, we want it to 'Stretch to Fit the Stroke Length', and the overlap should be
the one that is pointy, not this rounded overlap.
So the pointy one is the one we want.
And the 'Direction' should be the right arrow.
So this right here.
And now we'll say 'OK', and this has added this brush to our 'Brushes' palette.
So if we hit B on our keyboard, which takes us to our Brush Tool, OK, and now we can start
painting with our new brush.
Depending on how this is made, you can see some white space at the edges and that's causing
it to have white space at the edge of our brush, too.
So when you bring that in, maybe we could go into Photoshop and remove some of that
extra space around there, and that would change how this looks.
In fact, I'm going to do that right now.
I'm going to pull that PNG into Photoshop and see if we can get this to be changed.
I'm going to just get it really close to the edges like this with my Selection Tool, and
then I'll hit C, return, which is the Crop Tool, and we'll 'Save' that.
And now I'm going to place the new one...
make it pretty small... maybe a little smaller than what we had.
Now I'll create a new brush by just dragging this one into the 'Brushes'.
We'll choose 'Art Brush' again.
OK, and because of the way I brought this in, it's not allowing me to do an 'Art Brush'
because it's not embedded.
So we need to go to 'Links' and then just click the flyout and 'Embed the Image'.
Now we can pull it into our 'Brushes' palette, choose 'Art Brush', say 'OK', and then we
get all the same options.
I'm going to 'Stretch to Fit Stroke Length'.
Have a right arrow and make sure this is the pointy one and say 'OK'.
And now when we create something with our new brush, you'll see that it starts really
close to those edges and we just fixed that in Photoshop.
OK, so these are actually raster images.
They're not vectors.
If we go to Object>Expand Appearance, and we get an expanded version of this, there
are no points in here.
If we hit CMD Y, you'll see it's just a picture.
If you want this to be made up of editable points, we'll come right up here to 'Image
Trace' and choose the drop down.
With these I usually like to choose 16 colors.
We'll say 'OK'.
And it might take a while.
OK, and then I'll hit CMD E to expand it.
And now you can see we have a lot of little tiny paths in there.
I'm going to click off over here, and then I'll hit my Y button, which is the Magic Wand,
and I'll click this white in here, and just delete it.
Now if we draw a rectangle behind it with our M Tool, hit D on our keyboard to get a
white fill and a black stroke, and then hit SHIFT X to switch those.
Now we have a black box with a white outline.
I'm going to hit SHIFT CMD and [ to send it to the back.
Now you can see how it looks after it's been expanded.
If we extend our black background, you can see the difference between the raster edges
which are kind of fuzzy and blurry, and the very hard vector edges that we just created.
So it's whatever you want to end up with.
Usually I like to have all vectors in my Illustrator files, but this is pretty complex.
So in this case, I'd probably stick with this raster one.
All right, that's my video for this week.
If you liked it please click on the 'Like' button.
And I'll see you next week for another graphic design tutorial.
Thank you!!!