Transcript:
Oh, hello there. Well, let’s kick this off. Welcome to another dance key. Live, my name is Daniel White. Some of you know me as dance key and today in this livestream, we’re going to be learning how to draw with brushes in Adobe Illustrator, and just to let, you know, don’t be alarmed if we go through the stream and my eyes do disappear into the background as well as being a complete noob when it comes to green screening, someone painted their wall in their office blue and forgot they had blue eyes, so my eyes are now probably disappeared so so we all know that? I’m terrible with green screens, but you know, there’s room to improve Hello to everybody in the chat. How are you guys all doing? I’m doing pretty well. I’m feeling good very busy today as well as a slightly later start today. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Malik, Ashleigh, Sager, Yang, Richard Hall. Hello, sir. How are you all doing? Hugo, nice to see you again. Mate, awesome! Ah, there’s so many of you, right. This is going to be really, really cool, so we’re going to do the live tutorial and then after that, we’ll do the after-party thing at the end. So if you do want to stick around and you’ve got any other questions relating to design this live stream or anything else, Stick around after the outro and I’ll come back and we’ll have a conversation. You became so much smaller on the screen. Yes, I did. I need to just get me out of the way more because I was like getting in the way of all the tools, right, That’s enough rambling. Let’s jump into this. So this is going to be all about how to draw with brushes, and, of course, in Illustrator, you’ve got the paintbrush tool and you can left-click and draw and you can create a wavy line, and you know, you can actually get a few additional options you can double click this in the toolbar on the left, and you get a few more options so you can adjust the fidelity so that is how accurate it is to the line that you actually draw, so if we bring this down. Illustrator is very much going to trust me to draw the line exactly how. I want it, however, we can drag this all the way up to the other end to the smooth end and illustrator will very kindly smooth my lines. So if I draw some shapes kind of freehand here and it’s not quite smooth illustrator, You can see, smooths out those curves so by default. I’ve kind of got it set to a little bit of a balance, but you can adjust that. Find something that works for you, depending on what you’re working on, and you’ve got a few other options here, so you can add a filter. The new brushstrokes or you can keep it selected as you draw, so you can take a moment. Breathe, have a cup of tea and then continue that line, so you access those just by double clicking on the paintbrush tool in the toolbar on the left and the shortcut in illustrator for the paintbrush tool is B on the keyboard. Okay, so that’s awful, so let’s get rid of that, so we’ve got our paintbrush tool and we can draw a line and, okay, that’s fine. What we can also do is we can open our stroke panel on the right now. If you don’t see this, don’t worry, just go to window at the top and down to stroke, and you can adjust the weight that will just whack this up to six. And voila! You can see that we now get a slightly thicker line and we can actually use the main selection tool to select a line that we’ve already drawn and we can go ahead and adjust that because you can see. It’s still a stroke down here in the bottom of the toolbar. And as with any line that you draw or shape, you draw in illustrator? If it has a stroke, you can adjust the width, the color, all of those different stroke related properties. Okay, so that’s pretty cool. Let’s go and let’s bump this up to five, and we’ve drawn another terrible line. Now you may know that you may think wow, big deal paintbrush tool who cares, but if you didn’t know this, then this is going to blow your mind because I remember the day that I found this out. I was like, wow Illustrator is so cool. Go up to window and down to brushes and you’ll see this window here. Okay, there’s a few brushes there. No big deal now. Click the menu icon in the top right corner and go open library. And you can even load another library if you’ve downloaded one, and you’ve got lots of options here, so we’ll just start with artistic, so we’ll just click on this and you can see. It loads a specific library, Calligraphic brushes, calligraphic calligraphic. I’m not entirely sure how you say it and I know there’s a calligrapher in the chat who just said there in the chat. So you can correct me on that one. Okay, so you get these cool calligraphy brushes. So if you are doing any kind of calligraphy work, you can choose these different brushes with varying angles here, and you can use these to do letters now. I’m not a calligrapher as you can probably tell, but it’s kind of cool, and I’m sure you’re much better than me or this, but again you can go in and you can just that line. Wait so lots of flexibility and put wait. There’s more. It’s not just about those calligraphy brushes, and if we go and draw a line, in fact, we’ll go back to the normal brush, so we’ll just pick one of the round ones. There we go, We’ve got another terrible line. What we can do is click these arrows at the bottom and we can scroll through all of the different brush libraries. So you can see. There are tons of different effects. You’ve got kind of more watercolor effects. You’ve got paint brushes. You’ve got ink. You got chalk charcoal pencil effects. So if I select this rather plain and boring line that I’ve drawn In fact, that’s the let’s create a copy of this Ill. Just copy this a few times because you can apply one effect on top of another on top of another and what you can create is pretty much limitless here and a lot of fun, especially if you’ve never used these before. Okay, let’s just try and position these, so you can see them, right, so we’ve got three lines. The top one. Let’s pick this one at the top and we’ll pick a different one down here and we’ll scroll across and pick. Let’s go for one of those watercolor brushes, so you can see you get three completely different, very creative and illustrative brush effects. Do you use a tablet to draw, yes? I’m using a Wacom Intuos Pro. It’s the small one, it’s awesome and it’s also linked in the description, but wait, there’s more we’ve not only applied these awesome effects as I say, we can go and apply other effects as well or you can go into the stroke panel and adjust the weight so you could even use this to create some kind of crazy texture just by bumping that weight up. Oh, okay, you could set as a dashed line. Look at that dashed line. Just makes it go. Absolutely bananas so relieved that off for now, but we’ll come back to that. That looks quite fun. So, okay, one point now is little bit thick, but we can’t even go less than that. We can go down to nor point seven-five not 0.5 and actually we get something quite cool. And, conversely, we could bring this one up and we could adjust this one here as well. So if you like doing a lot of freehand stuff, more creative, iterative stuff in Illustrator, rather than all the kind of you know, clean lines and very structured and directed. But then this gives you loads of options. You’ve got all these brush libraries here. These are built into illustrator. That’s the CC version. By the way you can download other brush libraries and you can play around with all the widths you can. You can draw whatever you want and you can apply all these different effects to what you’ve created, so if you were to take a logo, for example, or a letter with some lettering, we’ll do it with some lettering now, so well just type a word and we’ll go funky, just because it’s a funky Friday or something like that, so we’re using a pretty boring font, You know, just myriad Pro. I think, in fact, let’s just get rid of that. We’ll go fun. Keep it simple now. This is Editable, editable text at the moment, so it’s not going to let us apply that effect, but we can do is go to type and down to create outlines, and suddenly that editable just becomes another shape in Illustrator and what I did just there was going to outline mode that’s command or control Y on the keyboard. It effectively gives you a wireframe of your design so really, really handy and we’ve now got three loads of fun way and we’ll select this and you can see by clicking one of those brush effects, it adds that as a stroke and we could remove the fill and again, just go in and adjust that weight to make it a bit thinner. If we like and we’ll pick another one, see what we got here. Ink splatters, bit to bits. You crazy bit to craziness, lets. Calm down a little bit. Come on, okay, so kind of a little bit rough around the edges. That’s pretty cool again. You can get rid of the fill or you can keep the fill, depending on what you’re going for. We’ll, just make sure that that fill and stroke are the same color, or we can pick an entirely different color there. We go, so we’ve made them. Both the same shade of blue and you can see. There’s like a little bit of a difference there. We kind of using that effect, so you can see the outline a bit more. Well, what we could do is select all of this. If you wanted it to. All be the same blue. We just go to object, expand appearance and we’ll just object is no. We don’t need to do it again. Fantastic and with everything. Selected in the Pathfinder panel, just select unite and it will merge all of that into one shape and it’s one shape with a single fill color. And then I can just go and pick any color. I like from the color panel on the right and as with any other panels. If you don’t see that, don’t worry, you’re not going crazy is up here and you can see it there so. I’ve just kind of organized all my panels already, don’t worry. If that bit was a little bit too quick, this will be live on Youtube later on so you can go back and re-watch that bit. But essentially it’s just selecting your shape, object, expand appearance or expand. Just keep clicking either of those until you don’t get any dialog boxes pop up and then once you’ve expanded your shape from the Pathfinder panel just select the top left option unite and it will combine all of those pieces into one complete shape and it will give it a fill color. And then you can change that fill color to whatever you like. Okay, right, let’s do one more now. We’ve got some other ones here. These are these are especially creative, lets. Move that fill. And, of course, this is just using one font as well. You know, you could use a ton of different fonts. Sir, that’s rather interesting. This, hmm, there we go here. We go now we’re getting creative, okay so. I’ve just ungrouped the shape here. Go to object Ungroup, and I’m going to move these letters apart a little bit, It’s quite a quite a thick effect there, so just create a bit of space. Wow, so some of them work really well. Some of them don’t work as well. They might work better for straight lines rather than kind of going round the different shapes that lettering pose. But something like that. You know, it’s pretty cool when we can what we can do is bring these letters back in now. I’ve reduced that stroke weight and then just go to object and group with all of them selected and again object expand appearance and we’ll keep expanding and aluminum. It gives us a question. Mark is the fill, but we can, of course, just pick a Swatch and it will add that that’s added it as they fill. Okay, so it literally colored in everything, but let’s try something else, another way of selecting that and see if this works there we go, so if you’ve never done this before and you can use the Magic Wand tool and select a particular color, So I’m going to select whatever on Earth This color is here. I’m not sure what the color the name of this color is, but I can click it with the Magic Wand Tool, and it will select every instance of that color within the document. So at the moment, there’s nothing else with that color, so it’s only selected this here and I can just double. Click another color set that as a global Swatch and it’s only changed that one color. If you have a document with lots of colors already, just make a new document. Drop it in there, use the magic wand tool and then copy and paste it back to your main document and now. I’ve set this as a global Swatch I can, of course load that Swatch up and just adjust this. I’m running out of screen space. Err, just adjust this. I mean, you know, I can change the color as I like. I don’t have to go and reselect everything. So that is the advantage of using global swatches is it means you can edit the Swatch and it will update within the design document, so it saves you a lot of time there. Cool, right, so there is a little bit about lettering, lets. Try something else, so we’ve got our paintbrush tool. Now you see, we’ve got another. You can actually draw with this as well, which is quite cool. We’re going to go back and just select one of the defaults, and it remembers all of your recent brushes there, so we’ll just load up that that library, and let’s just go pack and pick one of these brushes here, so the little brushes, and I’m probably just going to thicken that up a touch so 5 points and we could try and draw something. Let’s draw like an exclamation mark, so I’m doing this all freehand using the tablet and the goal is here is to do something very kind of rough. You know, a lot of the work. I do is very clean. Cut line and everything. So I’m going to try and do something a bit more a bit more rough around the edges. So so what I’m doing here is I’m drawing that attempting to draw that kind of circle to dot the bottom of the exclamation mark. I’m getting it wrong multiple times, but I’m using this shortcut here, So that’s command or control Z. Just to quickly have a go know, undo have another go undo, so it makes it very. It’s a very good way of speeding up your workflow as well and so. I can just keep doing this until I get one, okay. That’s fine! I’ll just extend that. Just adjust it a little bit cool, so let’s just let’s say that. I’m happy with that. Otherwise, we’ll be all here all day with me, just drawing exclamation marks, and I can then go in. I can adjust that. Wait, so we could go for something a little bit more linear. It’s quite cool, but you can create copies as well and just then try out different styles and see what works but then. I’m going to go through the brush library again and just pick something that’s a bit more kind of like, you know, if it was actually drawn on paper now, this one’s quite thin, but I can increase that weight a little bit and try some different effects, so I think we’ll go for one like this, and I’ll also hold alt and shift left, Click and drag and we’ll go for something a bit watercolour II and I can group all of this together, So each of these exclamation marks is now grouped into their own shape. And I’ll bring that back in and go object. Arrange, send to back, so we’ve got the watercolor effect behind. We’ve got the darker kind of thinner stroke on top and this one over here. We could use that. I suppose we could do something funky like that and double it up, but I think we’ll just we’ll throw that one off to one side for now. We’ll focus on this one. So again we’re going to go back to the paintbrush, select one of these big round default brushes and I might to know as a good size, so I’ll select the stroke. Pick a nice color. Let’s go for, let’s go for a yellow, Nice, vibrant yellow, and I’m just gonna start scribbling this in. I’m making sure to keep the angle that I’m scribbling on as consistent as possible as if I was actually scrolling this in so rather than kind of mixing it up and going up down left right, and I want it to go outside the edges a little bit, so this is the style. I’m going for so really rough. And, of course that’s on top, so we want that underneath, so you can select both pieces of yellow by holding shift and then go to object, arrange and center back, and then we’ve then got our exclamation mark effect there and we can kind of go in and we can ungroup all of this. If we like, and I can just adjust the size, make that a little bit more round, so essentially the components that we’ve got, we’ve got the watercolor effect. We’ve got these thinner, more kind of scratchy scribbly effect, and then we have the yellow fill as well And then when I’m happy, I can select everything and group that together and there we go. That’s how to draw with brushes in Adobe Illustrator as always guys. I really hope you enjoyed. This live tutorial if you’d like to stick around after the outro. I’ll come back and I’ll do a bit more. Q&A, answer your questions. Yeah, leave a like if you enjoyed this video. If you’re watching this after it’s gone live, please do leave any questions or comments down below. Take care and I’ll see you next time.