Transcript:
In this chapter, we are going to explore all the different types of brushes that you can use and create in Adobe Illustrator. There are five type of main brush categories, calligraphic, scatter, art, bristle and pattern in this first video. I will show you how to set up and work with calligraphic brushes, and we will see how to do digital hand lettering like this example of the word illustrator here that I prepared hand. Lettering and calligraphy is an amazing but very difficult craft so to learn it well prepared to study and practice a lot before you can actually do something nice. I consider myself an amateur in hand lettering, so I am nowhere near as good as artists who specialize in doing these type of things either on paper or in Illustrator and just to give you an idea. Here’s some example from my Pinterest boards. Feel free to follow me. By the way you can find all these references that I show you here on my pin boards. So my username is yes. I’m a designer. That’s how you can find me now. Let’s go back to the examples, so here’s a few more vintage style hand lettering. Then let’s see a few other examples like this one here, very nice style. I really like this one as well simple, but very effective and nice composition, And, of course, a great quote from Walt Disney. Then we have a little bit more designed hand lettering. Here you can see clearly that it’s been created digitally and then another fun one at the end. Let’s go back to illustrator and see how to set up the brush to be able to do something like this. I already have another art board. Here prepared, that’s empty well. First of all, what you need to use is the brush tool for this. The paint brush tool. This has a brush definition. Drop down from which you can find already a couple of default brushes, but you can also find more brushes from the libraries and under artistic, for example, you will find calligraphic brushes, but there’s also other ones here, which we will come back to later, but for now let me just open up Calligraphic category and there you will find lots of default brushes that’s saved and that you can use what you need to do is to select one of them and immediately it will be added in your brushe’s library. And, of course, it will be also available from the options Bar Drop-down now. I already created a brush that I’m going to use and that’s this one here. If I double, click on it, I can show you the settings. I like to set the angle of the brush to 45 degrees, so it’s perfectly diagonal. I set the roundness to 0% So instead of a round shape, I like to keep it completely flat and the sighs I keep usually around 20 points and the control for the size I set to pressure, which means when I use my vacuum tablet. I will be able to control the size by pressing it harder. It will increase and pressing it gently it will go down in size. Unfortunately, if you have a mouse, you won’t be able to make use of the pressure feature. So then you can just keep it on fixed, or you can try random if you want. But the variation. I’m going to also keep on the maximum, so it should be the same as the size. So these are all the settings that normally I use for hand lettering or digital hand lettering. And let’s have a look how it works so now that it’s set up. I can see here on the top. It’s selected. I also have black stroke with one point sighs, I will be able to now start drawing, so here’s my first letter just as an exercise. I start with X. It’s one of my favorite letters to draw, and you will see me going back and forth sometimes that’s. I just use the shortcuts. The f1 f2 that I set up earlier. So there you go. There is my first letter now. Let’s try why that’s another one of my favorites, so I try to do it in one go, but I usually don’t succeed, so I’m going to do it in two steps. That’s okay, then we can try an M and notice that whenever I go down or at least I try to be consistent whenever I go down. I try to press it harder and then when I go up, I try to keep it thin, so that’s like an R, for example, so up thin down strong, generally with this setting. What you can do is that when you draw diagonal lines, they should be very thin and when you go down automatically, it should be thicker or in any other direction than diagonal, so that should already help you to be able to draw like this and I’ll show you with the mouse. If I just use the mouse. Even with that, I can draw quite nice lines. Because the way it’s set up already allows for varying the brush size, so even with the mouse, you will be able to do nice hand lettering, but, of course, if I use the pen tablet, I can add even more definition. You can see how much nicer I can do. The lines, especially for these decorative elements. In your lettering, this will be very important and you can see how I can add dynamic lines, and then we choose the size of it again to have some expression in the way you are. Drawing is to be honest. Hand lettering is really somewhere between typography and drawing, but most artists would agree that hand lettering is not the same as using fonts, although there are some phones that try to replicate how and lettering works, it is actually more similar to drawing. So you are drawing letters. Now don’t forget that whenever you work in Illustrator, you don’t have to actually undo the last step like this line. Here is not nicely connected, so I can always move it closer. Just shift it slightly and immediately. It looks better the same thing here. If I zoom closer? I can see that my lines are not connecting, so I will make sure they are connecting, so I can always move it. Use the arrows on the keyboard to nudge them in place. Also, don’t forget that if you select the line and you use the pencil tool, For example, with the options that we normally use it with so keep selected and edit selected parts, we can continue adding extra detail continuing the lines that we already have, of course, try not to go too far because it can get a little bit too complex after a while, but some extra detail might look quite nice. So let me just move these letters to the side. Select that line there. Let’s say like that also. If you feel like some of your letters need to be a little bit more straight or align the lines a little bit better. You can also do that. Just select individual points like with the direct selection tool. I can select these points at the bottom here and just drag them down a bit more, and then we can even use the smooth tool so we can go over this line here. Smooth it out. Something like that now. It’s a little bit more straight. I can also select this point here. Drag it down and then select the other point. That’s creating this curve and drag it up, so I can really refine the way This M looks like, and you might be thinking that it’s crazy that you have to go through each letter individually, but believe me, that’s how hand lettering is like. Even on paper artists would refine and refine and refine that, drawing several times tracing over the previous results so never expect to draw a perfect letter. The first time, of course, someone who has thousands of hours of practice will be able to do amazing things, and you probably seen videos of that like that and so on and so forth so you can imagine. I would be able to draw letters individually to practice, and then the interesting part comes when you start combining them together going back to my previous artboard. You can see. I used exactly the same technique for this world. And, of course I didn’t succeed drawing this straight away. I adjusted a lot on the letters. Also, we drew a couple of the decorative elements before. I decided that I keep it as final and this is still nowhere near perfect, so I would be able to spend more time refining, of course, but I thought I give you an example of how a word could look like at the end and just one last note is that although the style that you are going to use in your hand lettering, it’s very personal. It’s something that is based on the way you write, and also the way you draw. It’s a little bit of a mixture of those two, but you can still train yourself to have multiple styles that you can do hand lettering in so for example, with the same brush. I could draw an end like that. See how different it looks like. I could also do it a bit more playful like this, and then I could draw it with a little bit more strength. If I want a bit more structure like that or like this, even stronger and many many other ways that you would be able to draw the same letter. And, of course, if you practice, you will have a wide range of different styles that you can use in your hand lettering, one other thing that I do usually with these calligraphic brushes. If I drew letters is that I set a couple of guides so that could be my baseline that could be another one for the x-height. It’s called the lowercase letters and then for cap height. We could have another line somewhere up there. So for like a capital letter, Let’s say B I could use that. And then, of course I can always select my lines and I can stretch them out. Using the free transform or just simply the bounding box holding down the shift key. So if you feel like they are not aligned, you can always manually Align them like this are here again. We could make it bigger to make sure it fits into the same size. Something like that, so a good way to practice is to draw the same letter several times and look for references to get inspiration and then a great way to really practice is to pick a coat, for example, something that you find funny or something that you think is really wise and then turn that into and digital ten lettering piece, so just going back to that example that I really like you see here. We have the quote hand lettered, but there’s also a couple of illustrative elements like this ribbon, those floral motifs there and to make it look consistent. You can actually use the same brush or something similar to what you use for the letters, so instead of using shapes just draw the ribbon itself as well that way, the whole design will look consistent, so this was just the first category of brushes, the calligraphic brushes, but now we can move on to another big category called scatter brushes in the next video.