Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hey, guy’s today! I’m gonna show you how I create custom lettering in this gritty Dry-brush style in Adobe Illustrator, So that you can create your own personalized text and really make it unique instead of just using a standard font now for this tutorial. I’ll mostly be using the pen tool to create letters. So for those of you who are not familiar with the pen tool? I suggest watching my beginner’s guide beforehand. It’ll teach you everything you need to know about the pen tool, so feel free to check that out. I’ll leave a link in the video description. All right, so let’s start by creating a new illustrator document. I’m gonna make this one 10 by 10 inches, but it doesn’t really matter since we’re gonna be creating vector text, which can be scaled up and down as much as you want without losing resolution. So now that we have our document ready, We’ll need to go ahead and download some brushes. I found these awesome. Illustrator brushes offered by spoon graphics. These are 24 high quality vector brushes and Chris from spoon graphics is giving them away for free. So big. Shout out to Chris for the freebies. I’ll leave a download link in the video description, and I’m also gonna leave a link to spoon graphics this channel for those of you who aren’t familiar with them. His channel is filled with amazing Photoshop in illustrator tutorials. So you guys should definitely check it out. Alright, so once you’ve downloaded the brushes, you can go ahead and Unzip the file, then go back to illustrator and open your brushe’s palette by going to window and then selecting brushes now you can go up here in the brushe’s menu and then go down to open brush library and select other library. Then you can navigate to wherever you save the brushes You just downloaded and open the brushes file. You should now have a new brush palette with all of your new brushes, and I’m just gonna close this one here. All right, now you can either start tracing freestyle, which is fine or you can sketch out your word on paper and then scan it to have a general idea of the style You’re going for, which is what? I’m gonna do, so I’m just gonna drag and drop this sketch to my artboard. If you don’t have a scanner, you can just take a picture of your sketch with your phone and upload that to your computer, which will we’re just fine now. I’m just gonna make it bigger by holding down alt and shift to keep everything proportionate and then dragging this upper corner and I’m gonna take down the opacity up here to about 30% so I can still see it as a reference in the background, but it’s not too dark. Then make sure you have your sketch Selected and Press Command 2 or Ctrl 2 on PC to lock your sketch, so you can’t accidentally move it around later on. Alright, now, let’s start tracing our letters, so let’s go ahead and bring up the pen tool by pressing P and then make sure that the fill color down here is set to none and that the stroke is set to black or any other color. So I’ll start by tracing this part of the B here by creating my first path right here in the middle of the bar, and then I’ll select one of the brushes We just downloaded, so Im. Just gonna go ahead and pick this one now. The weight of the brush is a bit too thin, so I’m gonna go to the stroke palette and increase the weight to match my sketch. This is good enough and I’m just gonna adjust the shape by moving the control points and the handles until I’m satisfied now. This looks pretty good, so I can move on and trace the rest of this B so again. I’m gonna start tracing right here in the middle of the weight of the letter and try to follow the shape and keep in mind that it’s usually best to create your letters with as few points as possible, so it’s easier to adjust afterwards. Now since we have a hard angle here. I’m gonna break my path by holding down Alt and then bringing my handle all the way up here and I’m just gonna keep going and adjust things as I go. Then I can go on and select one of the dry brushes, try and select different brushes every once in a while to create some variations so that it looks more natural. I’ll just go with this one for now, but we can always change the brush later on and again. I’ll bring the weight up, so it looks thicker now. The weight of this troch is pretty even all around, which is fine. If you’re going for more of a mono line script style, but as you can tell from my sketch. I’m going for something with a lot of weight Variations where the top of the letters are very wide and it gets narrower towards the bottom. So I’m gonna adjust this with the width tool, which you can find right here or by pressing shift in W now. I can go ahead and make these upper parts whiter. You can adjust the width anywhere along your path, but I suggest only altering it where you already have anchor points and as I’m heading towards the bottom of the letter, I progressively make the weight smaller. Now, let’s say I wanted this part to be a bit rounder instead of straight. I could grab this handle right here and then bring it back out like this, and don’t be afraid to mess around with the shape and the weight of the letters to figure out what style you like best. All right, so now. I want to adjust the weight of this bar, but I can’t access the control points because this path is placed behind this one, so my control points keep snapping on this one, so I’m just gonna select this path and then go to object arrange and then bring to front that way. I can adjust these control points without snapping on this path all the time so again. I’m going to make it wider at the top and dinner at the bottom. All right, so I’m just gonna repeat the same technique for the rest of the letters, and I’m just gonna speed this up a little bit, so you guys can see the whole process. [MUSIC] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay. So once all, the letters are done, you can adjust the scaling on each letter so that they’re all roughly the same size and then feel free to move them around just to make sure that the spacing between the letters is consistent by doing this. The composition of your word will look much more uniform as a whole once. You’re satisfied with the overall result. I would suggest duplicating your word by selecting everything and then keeping Alt pressed and then dragging it out to make a copy. So this one would be your backup. In case you want to go back and change anything now again, Select the whole word, then go to object and select expand appearance, which is going to outline all of your pads. This will allow you to scale your word up and down without deforming your strokes. Then you can group all the letters together by selecting everything and pressing Command G or Ctrl G on PC. Just to make sure that everything stays together now. I’m just gonna get rid of the sketch in the background since we don’t need it anymore. So I’ll just go back up here to object and select. Unlock all I can then select my sketch and just delete it now. You can always go back in edit parts of your text and let’s say. I want to change the color. For example, I can just select my word and then double click over here in the fill color and select any color. I want. You can also select your word and then copy and paste it in a Photoshop document. If you want to use it over a certain background or a picture, for example, and keep in mind that this is a vector object, so you can scale it up and down as much as you want without losing any resolution. So that’s it guys. I really hope you enjoyed this video and that you’ll try different types of lettering styles using this technique, and as usual, If you plan on posting this on Instagram, make sure to tag me Because I’d love to see what you guys do with this. Thank you so much for watching guys and I’ll catch you in the next one [Music].