Transcript:
– [Narrator]. Hello and welcome to this Design Cuts, video tutorial and today we’re looking at Illustrator brushes. Were going to look at the three main types of brushes that you’re going to be using in Illustrator. I’m going to show you how you can instal and configure brushes that you download from Design Cuts and make them paint the way that you want them to paint. Now before we get started in Illustrator, let’s just take a trip to the Design Cuts website. Because I want to show you the brushes that we’re going to be looking at today. Now some of the brushes we’ll be looking at are from this Watercolour Brushes set by Artifex Forge We’re also going to be using some of the 50 Boho Tribal Gypsy Brushes And we’ll also look at the Hipsta Borders, which, in actual fact are patent brushes. So heading back to Illustrator? I have opened here the Tribal. Boho brushes, collection. Now this was kind of interesting, because if I just zoom back out, you’ll see that when you open up the file, you actually see a picture of all the brushes. So you have a really good idea as to what’s available in this collection. This is another file of brushes and those are from the Hipsta Borders collection. And when you open the file, you might be a little bit curious because it looks like there’s nothing in the file. Well, the brushes themselves are going to be in the brushe’s palette here. So when you open up the brushe’s palette, you’ll see the brushes that are in this collection. And here’s another one. This is the other half of the Hipsta Borders collection. In the file that you download for the Watercolour brushes, You’ll see that when you have all those brushes here, but you’ve also got a couple of art boards and you can turn the art boards on to see what on those art boards. And so you get a little bit of extra information in this file. So everyone of those brush files is going to come looking a little bit different to the rest. Now the brushes that you’re getting here in the Watercolour brushes collection, those are what are called Art Brushes. These are going to paint with this particular design along a path. So if I go and let’s just add a new layer to this file. Let’s go and get the brush tool here. I have a sort of blue colour selected. I’m just going to get one of these brushes, and when I paint it, I’m going to get that brush stroke. Now I’ve got quite a wide brush stroke here. It’s four pixels. If the stroke is a bit narrower, then the brush is going to paint narrower. In the Tribal Boho brushes collection. Here we’ve got a couple different types of brushes. The feathers here are all art brushes, so they’re going to behave exactly like that. Watercolour brush did. But these here are what are called patent brushes and we’ll see them in a minute. As they’re going to be really handy for creating designs around circles or squares and things like that In this group, which are the Hipsta Borders the same things happening. We’ve got patent brushes. Only these patent brushes Come with corner tiles. So I’m going to show you how they would work as well. And with this Hipsta Border set again, they’re all patent brushes. The other type of brush well going to look at which we haven’t seen yet is scatter brushes. I’m going to show you how you can create your own from some of the elements that I have available here. But say, you’re working on your own project and you want to use some of the brushes that you’ve downloaded in your own project. Well, I’m going to open up a brand new file and we’re going to look at how we can get access to the brushes that we’ve downloaded And how we can use them in our own projects. I’ve gone ahead and created a brand new Illustrator file, but in the brushes panel here. You can see that all I have is the default set of brushes. None of the brushes that we looked at earlier and for which the files are still open in Illustrator are even available to me. So what I need to do is to go and get them and I’ve stored all my brush files here in a special folder. They’re all together, so I’m going to open the flyer panel here and I’m going to choose open brush library And I’m going to select other library. So it says the word library, but in actual fact, all it’s looking for is an AI file, so I’m going to click other library and I have the location of that folder in my clipboard, so I’m going to paste it in and press enter, and this is where I put my Design Cuts brushes, so they’re in a folder called Design Cuts and got them organised in the resources and their brushes and Ai brushes Just so I could find them really easily. So I’m going to click on this Tribal Boho brushes, file and click open Now. That’s the exact same file here as I’ve got opened already in Illustrator, but this is the way that you get brushes into a new file, so I’ll click open. Here is the panel of brushes and what I can do is just click on a brush here. I can just start painting it. And you can see that when I do. It’s added automatically to the brushes panel. So just by using one of these brushes, it will be automatically added to the document. But I can also go and select the first brush shift. Click on the last brush and just drag and drop them in there. Now they’re in the brushes panel and they’re always going to be accessible whenever I open this particular document. So I can go ahead and close this panel down now if I wish. So using these art brushes, you can just draw a line and the art brush will be applied to the line. I’m going to select over this because if I widen up the line if I make this stroke thicker, you can see that the brush takes on a slightly different look. And this might be the look that you’re looking for. Now, at the moment, the brush is painting with black because that’s the colour I’ve got set for my stroke, but I’m going to select a different colour and let’s see what happens. Well, these brushes have been set up so that they will paint in the colour that you have set for the stroke. And if I just double click on the brush itself, we can see how the person who designed it. Set it up. And this is what they did. They set the colorization method to tints. They made their brush black and they set the colorization method to tints, which means that we can colour it any colour we like. So sometimes you might find that a brush is black, but it continues to paint with black Well. If you open up the brush itself by just double-clicking on it here in the brushes panel, then you can change its colorization method to tints and it will probably paint in colour. Now those are the art brushes because they paint along a line, but these brushes here are patent brushes. They’re going to paint very differently. So I’m going to select a ellipse here. I’m actually going to draw out a circle. And I’m currently painting in red. That’s fine, I’m going to click on one of these brushes. These patent brushes. And patent brushes repeats. So there is an element here that is repeated all the way around the circle. And so we can select different patent brushes and see how they paint on this circle. Now those patent brushes, those Tribal Boho patent brushes work really, really well on a circle. A little bit differently on a square. So I’m just going to show you a square here. Let’s go and add one of those brushes. You can see that these are patent brushes that go along the edge of the shape, but there’s nothing in the corner. And that’s a designer consideration. Some people set their brushes up with corners and some people don’t. These patent brushes can also be used along the lines. So I’m just going to draw out a line here and you can see that. I’m painting with this patent brush along my line. So let’s go and get another one. See, it’s just painting along the line. Now let’s go and have a look at the Hipsta brushes because they’re just a little bit different patent brushes. Just going to open them up too. I’m just going to grab brushes, Group 2. Let’s go and put these in the brushes panel as well. I’m just going to close it now. I’m just going to drag out a square or rectangle here, and let’s click on one of these Hipsta patent brushes And these brushes paint with corners. But it’s really hard to see the corner right now because the brush it pretty big. So I’m going to reduce the stroke And when I reduce the stroke, you can see that there’s corner tiles on these brushes. We also know they’re corner tiles because there are corner tiles here in the brushes panel. These don’t have corner tiles and the corner tiles would be here and here, but these do. Now this one’s got a very sort of funny little squiggle in the middle here, and we can get rid of that squiggle by changing the brush a little bit. But this time, I’m not going to double-click on the brush to change it for all the times that we might use it. I’m going to change it just for this shape. So I’m going to click here on options and selected object and because the rectangle here is selected. Then I’m changing the options for this rectangle. I’ve got preview turned on. I’m just going to click add space to fit. You can see that the brush changes all that squiggly bit just disappears, and the brush is better sized around this shape. Now we can also go and reduce the size of it. And that might give it a slightly different look as well. So you can reduce the size here or you can reduce it by reducing the stroke weight. So that’s patent brushes and we’ve had a look at some art brushes. Let’s take a look at the third kind of brush, which is a scatter brush. And we don’t actually have any scatter brushes in these collections. But you know what We can make our own. So what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to use one of these tribal ones, and I really love this little fish here. And I want to make the fish into a scatter brush. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to pick the fish up here and I’m going to drag them out of the brushes panel into my document. And all I get is a fish. And that fish is just perfectly sized and ready for me to make a scatter brush of it. So, with this little fish selected, I’m going to open the fly out panel. I’m going to choose new brush and I’m going to make it a scatter brush and I’ll click. OK, I’m going to make the colorization method tints because we’ve already talked about the way that allows us to recolor our brushes. And for now, I’ll just click OK, And I’m going to just delete the fish. So now I want to show you how you can configure a scatter brush. I’m going to draw a path, so I think I’m just going to use the brush tool here. And I’m just going to draw a path for my fish. And because my fish was selected, they’re automatically applied to the path. But if something else we’re applied to the path, then you can just go and apply your scatter brush by selecting the path and just click on the fish. And of course, the fish are being coloured because this stroke colour is red. So if we want orange fish, then I’m just going to make myself some orange fish by changing the stroke colour, the fish change colour. Now, right, now, this scatter brush is sort of behaving a little bit like a patent brush. So let’s make it look a little bit more like a scatter brush. So, with my path selected, I’m going to click here on options and selected object because that allows us to change the behaviours of this patent brush. I’m going to turn preview on so that we can see the effect of the changes we’re about to make. And I’m going to set the size to random. Although you’ll see from this list that you can do things like, set it to precious sensitivity or the tilt of your brush. But I’m just going to choose random. And what I can do now is I can vary the size of my fish. So I can make them vary in size from about 80% of what they were to 100% or 110 or 150%. So all the fish are now changing size, and they’re doing it randomly along this path. You can also in the same way. Change the spacing. And again I’m going to set all of those to random. You can see you’ve got lots of options for how the spacing can be effected. So I’m going to close them up a little bit. So maybe 92% of the original spacing And vary it between that and about 183%. So right now our fish are spreading themselves out unevenly along the path. Let’s have a look at scatter because with scatter, we can move them either side of the path. So what I’m going to do is move some of them one side of the path and some of them to the other side of the path, And they’re going to move in a random way because I’ve set scatter to random. And for rotation, we can rotate them in a random way. So if I use from minus 180 to positive 180 then the fish are going to point in all sorts of directions. At the moment, the rotation is relative to the page, but I can set it relative to the path. And I’ll click, OK. So that’s what makes the scatter brush different to a patent brush. It can behave pretty much like a patent brush, but it can also break away from the path. These fish are all attached to this path, but they’re all going off in different directions. They’re all different sizes. They’re all different spacings. They’re all different scatter, and they’re all different rotations. So there’s a very quick introduction to Illustrator brushes what you might expect to find in brush files that you download from Design Cuts And how you can make use of those brushes in your own designs. I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning these Illustrator techniques. Let us know what you think in the comments below And give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed the tutorial.