Transcript:
Hi, everyone, and welcome it to a video on how to make a pattern rope brush in Illustrator. In this lesson, we’ll learn step-by-step the basics of how to create a pattern brush and how to use it, so let’s get started by creating a new custom document. We wanted to choose a size for our document and then choose in this drop-down menu here pixels. Once you’ve done that click create and this will set up a new document for us to make this tutorial easier. We’re also going to go through some basic setup options that you may want to use so to enable the grid. Let’s go to view and then down here we want to show grid, which is also control and the plus button the keyboard, and now we also want to go ahead and choose snap to grid so view and let’s go ahead and find a snap to grid here and the next thing we want to do. Is we want to go to edit preferences and now go to guides and grid? And now from here? We want to enter a value of 1 for the bottom two options here, so grid line, everyone pixels and subdivisions. Everyone cool now. We want to set all the unit measurements to pixels to do this. Go to the unit’s options here. And then we want to change all of these options from points to pixels, so lets. Go ahead and do that. Change them! Auto pixels And the next thing we want to do Is we want to go to general and make sure the keyboard increment value is set to 1 pixels once that’s done, click. OK, awesome now. With out of the way, let’s go ahead and get started with creating our rope pattern. Let’s go ahead and select the rectangle tool and we want to set the color of the rectangle tool here, so make sure that our stroke is set to none and let’s go ahead and double-click on the fill here, and we want to set the color here to are 2 3 9 G 2 O 3 and B 1 2 4 Once you’ve done that, let’s go ahead and create a new square here like so and to create the square. All you have to do is click and drag and then hold the shift key on the keyboard to make sure that it’s a four-sided equal square like so awesome. Now we want to go ahead and save this new color that we’ve created and to do this. We want to go to the swatches button here and then with the color selected. All we need to do is click on the new swatch button at the bottom. Here, click. OK, and then you’ll find that we’ve got a new color that we can easily select from our swatches menu from here, so if we ever have a another color selected and we want to move back into this one, all we have to do is open up our swatches menu. Click on the color, and we’ve got our color ready to use like so now we want to make the square 1.5 by 1.5 pixels, so let’s go ahead and select our square here and let’s go ahead and make it. So it’s 1.5 by PIX, 1.5 pixels by 1.5 pixels like so, and you can see that as I transform this square at the bottom right of the transform tool, you’ll see that we’ve got width and height, so that easily makes it so that it’s easier to create our 1.5 by 1.5 pixels square like so, you might also want to turn on the info panel to get a live preview of the position and size of the shapes that we’ll be creating so to do this go to window and then click on info and you can see here. We’ve got a info panel that we can use for out creating our shapes. So you can see as I create the shape here. You can see at the bottom, right. We’ve got a live view of how many pixels that shape is using. Excellent, so now that we’ve got our 1.5 by 1.5 size pixel square. The next thing that we want to do Is we wanted to select the direct selection tool, which is a on your keyboard or we can just simply select it at the top here now. Move back to our square here. And we want to make sure we just select the top right to point of our square here. We want to move it up by 25 pixels now. The info panel over here will help with that. Let’s go ahead and zoom in to our square first just to make it a little bit easier and to zoom in all you have to do is press ctrl and the plus button on the keyboard. Let’s move this up by 25 pixels, so select the top right corner here and let’s move it up by 25 pixels like so, so you can see at the bottom, right, It’s saying minus 25 once it’s reached that simply let go and it’s moved it up by 25 pixels, and now we want to do the same for the bottom right corner here, so select that and move that up by 25 so it’ll be minus 25 height here like so excellent now with the direct selection tool, we want to go ahead and select one of the corners here, so the top right corner, and now we want to go to the top toolbar where it says corners and then here you’ll find all the corner options, so let’s change the following, so the top right radius. We want to change this to 1.5 pixels and we want a relative rounding so select relative rounding like so excellent now for the top-left corner here, we wanted to go ahead and six corners again and select a radius of 17 pixels with absolute rounding like so and now for the bottom right, so let’s select the bottom right go to corners again, and this will also be 17 pixels with absolute rounding like so And now finally for the bottom bottom left corner. Here we want to go ahead and change this to a radius of 2 pixels with relative rounding excellent now let’s go ahead and press V on the keyboard or select our selection tool here and let’s go ahead and make a duplicate of this shape by Pres by selecting this and then pressing Ctrl C on the keyboard and then press ctrl shift V to paste it directly on top of our original shape. So if we go ahead and move this shape here like so, you’ll see, we’ve got two shapes here, except this one is directly on top of our first shape cool now select the shape and press left on the keyboard to move it to the left by one pixel. Copy the shape again, but don’t paste it just yet select both shapes, and now we want to use the Pathfinder tool, so let’s go ahead and select Pathfinder here, and now let’s go ahead and select – front like so, and this will create a cutout now. Press ctrl shift V again to repay. Stand, move it back to the right by one pixel by using your keyboard and pressing right cool now select it and send this to the back, so right, click, arrange and send it to the back. This will mean that’s our cutout shape. Here is on top of our original shape. Now select the cutout shape, and now we want to change the color of this double. Click on the color square here and we’ll change the color to our 219 G 1 8 3 and B 104 click. OK, and now we’re going to make another cut out using the original shape again. So let’s go ahead and make sure we’ve selected the original shape. Press ctrl C to copy it, then paste it, so ctrl shift V to paste it, and now we want to move it to pixels to the left, so press 1 to the left our two times, and now let’s paste it in place again, so Ctrl shift V to create a another shape, and now we want to select both of these shapes here and with those two selectors go over to the Pathfinder tool and this time we wanted to choose Intersect like so so now it’s created this new cutout shape over here. Now this will create two shapes, one shape, which is above here, which will act as a sort of original color. They all. We’ve also got the bottom shape here and also the shadow shape here as well now let’s go ahead and select the shape below, which is the original shape and lets. Change the disk color cool. So now let’s create a highlight, so make sure the original shape is selected. Press ctrl C to copy Ctrl shift V to paste it, and now we let’s go ahead and move this one pixel to the right and one pixel down using the keyboard. Now let’s go ahead and copy this shape. So Ctrl C and now we’re going to paste this so ctrl shift V and we’re going to do the same thing again, so move it one pixel to the right and one pixel down sex to both of these, and this time we’re going to use minus front, so go to the Pathfinder tool here, select minus front to create a new cut out shape here, which will be our highlight, so let’s go ahead and make this a pure white color like, so now we want to get rid of these extra parts of the shape here, so with the way we do, this is we select this top shape here. Press ctrl C and Ctrl shift V to paste this on top, select our highlight as well and this time we want to select intersect like so, and that will leave us with a nice clean highlight shape over here which we can now make this pure white again. Excellent, now what we can do from here is we can set the transparency, so go over to transparency here and set the opacity from a hundred percent to 50 like so excellent now select both of these top shapes, so this one and this one and we wanted to duplicate these so press Ctrl C. And then Ctrl shift V. Make sure that both of these shapes are selected and now at this time, go to our Pathfinder tool again and select minus front. This will give us two shapes so you can see we’ve got two shapes here, and we wanted to go ahead and remove the shape to the right, so using our direct selection tool, select the shape on the right here and select delete like so and now we’re left with just this shape on the left and from here, we want to set the color too, so let’s go ahead and set this color to our 219 G 1 8 3 and B 1 Oh, for like, so cool. Now go ahead and select the original shape again. Which is this one You can tell as it’s sort of filling the whole shape here and what we want to do from here Is we want to add a one-point stroke going around the whole shape, so let’s go ahead and go to the stroke options here and at the top here. We want to select just select any old color for now and from here, let’s go ahead and select stroke, so go to the stroke panel and we want to align the stroke to the outside, so align strokes the outside, so click that, and now we can change the color of this stroke. So make sure that we’ve got our color stroke here. Double click on that, and we can set the color to our 1 6 9 G 1 3 3 and B is 54 awesome. So now we’ve got a one-point stroke going around our whole shape, and we have our first wrote piece, select all of these shapes here by using the selection tool clicking and dragging to select all of the shapes. And now press ctrl. G to group them. Now we need to multiply the group to create our rope. Make sure that the rope section is selected, then go to effect distort and transform and select transform. And from here we want to set the move vertical, so move vertical here from 0 pixels to 17 pixels and we want to check transform objects, so make sure that is checked and also transform patterns so make sure transform patterns is also checked, and we want to create three copies so over in the copie’s box. Here we want to press. We want to have three copies here and click. OK, cool. Now let’s go ahead and zoom out here to see what we’ve got. So now you can see. We’ve got a repeated shape, which now looks like our rope excellent, so let’s go ahead and select this group and click object and let’s go ahead and click expand appearance to create these rope shapes. Excellent, now, let’s go ahead and press ctrl G to group them and press from here. We want to go to object and let’s select transform and lets press move so from here, we want to enter 35 for our horizontal and then press the copy button and you’ll see now we’ve got a duplicate of our rope pattern. Excellent, now, let’s create the torn ends, so using the pen tool, so let’s select the pen tool here, which is P on the keyboard and make sure that we set the pen tool to stroke. Otherwise it will create a shape like while I’m doing here, so let’s go ahead and make sure that we swap the color to stroke here like so, lets. Delete this and the way you use. The Pen Tool is by clicking a point to create a point. Click to create another point. And as you click, you can hold it and drag the mouse button to create these handles like so otherwise. If you don’t if you want a straight line, just click one point and click another point to create a straight line like so cool, so let’s go ahead and delete these two points. I’m just going to zoom in to one of our rope shapes here and using this pencil. We want to make sure that we don’t want our strokes to go wider than our rope pattern here, so we don’t want to go past if I create a new shape here. We don’t want to go past this square or let’s see we can do this or this square. So these are the two edges that we don’t want to overlap, so lets. Go ahead and select our stroke here again. We can also edit our stroke using the selection tool here like so now. I’m going to create some more strokes, so just press P on the keyboard to create another stroke like so so each time you create a stroke press P and create a new one like so cool, and you can also use the direct selection tool here to edit the point of the stroke, So you can go ahead and do that. It’s just moving these strokes around to create a different type of shape like so you can also edit the handles here just to see what sort of shapes that we can get just curving around, moving it over here. Excellent, so once you’ve created some strokes. The next thing that we want to do is if we wanted to select all of these and let’s go ahead and get rid of these rectangles first, so I’m just going to select all of these, like so press ctrl-g to group them, and then right, click arrange and then send it to back like so. I’m just going to move these up the Rope a little bit like so just to make the torn ends a little bit shorter. I’m just going to create one more one end here just to give it a little bit of balance. Click arrange, send it to back and just can select all of these and press ctrl. G to group them cool. You can also create some more strands of different colors to add some variety and a sense of depth so we can do that by. Let’s just go ahead and quickly demonstrate this by selecting another color and you’ll see how by creating some more strands, so give us a little bit of more of an interesting look to our rope like so cool, and now let’s go ahead and group these and send these to the back excellent. Now, let’s focus on the second duplicate rope. So from here, we want to create a 19 by 17 pixel rectangle. Let’s zoom out here first, and let’s create a new rectangle, so 19 by 17 so 19 width and a 17 height rectangle like so, and we want to align it to the bottom of the original rope shape, so using our selection tool, let’s go ahead and move this and align this like so and the way we want to line. This is we want to have one pixels on either side of the rope. So if we go ahead and move this further up the rope like so, and let’s go ahead and zoom in here. Want to make sure that we’ve got a pixel here and a pixel on the other side? So in fact, we want to make this a little bit smaller, so 19 by 17 and if I use another rectangle here you can see, you’ve got one pixel’s width excess on the left, and also we’ve got one pixel excess on the right like. So so now that we’ve positioned this. We want to set this color of this shape to something like a blue color, so let’s double Click on this and select any old blue color like so, and now we want to send this to the back, so right, click, arrange and center back awesome now before we do anything else. We want to make sure that the top of this square is in line with the bottom of the first section of this rope, so lets. Move this down and you can see now that the top of this shape here is in line with this shape. Here, excellent. So now let’s go ahead and select both of these shapes and we want to use the shape builder tool, which is shift. M on the keyboard now let’s go ahead and zoom in a little bit more here. So that we’re focusing on this blue shape. Hold shift on the keyboard. We want to select both the top and the bottom parts of this rope, so let’s go ahead and select all of this, so this select all of these shapes here and you can see as we select this or the shapes are going to be highlighted with an outline in red, and you’ll see that once. I released shift on the keyboard. It fills in a blue color. I’m going to really zoom in here to make sure that we get all of the excess shapes. So let’s undo that. Make sure that you select some of these extra points here like so, just making sure that we’ve got all the points selected cool, and you want to do the same with the bottom part as well, so let’s go ahead and zoom out for a little bit, lets. Make sure we get all of these shapes here now. Just zooming in to make sure that we’ve got all of these bottom shapes, remember to hold shift on the keyboard and then release shift or release the mouse button cool now. We wanted to select all the shapes, which is the same color as this blue here. So in order to do that, we wanted to select this blue rectangle shape. Here we want to go to select same and select appearance and you’ll see now that it’s selected all the blue colors here, and then once we’ve done that just simply hit the. Delete key to delete or the blue colors. Excellent now we’re left with the main body of our rope. Brush, use the direct selection tool here, so press a on the keyboard, and you can if you have any remaining elements here, so you can see if you’ve got any remaining elements. Small little shapes here like this one here, it’s. If I zoom all the way in here, you can see. We’ve got this small little shape. We can use the direct selection tool to delete these like so so just go around our our shape and make sure all of these have been deleted. So just a quick look here and we can see that. Everything seems to be quite straight awesome. Now let’s go back to our first rope with the frayed edges and the bottom here. We want to create a another 19 by 17 blue rectangle, So let’s go back to our rectangle tool, create another 19 width by 17 height rectangle like so and again. Let’s make this a blue color like so now we wanted to move this blue rectangle to exactly the same spot as where we moved it in our previous rope, which is aligned to the very bottom of the first segment, making sure that we’ve got one pixel’s worth of space on the left and the right like so and we can also check this by moving this Square over to our body rope here, so you can see it fits perfectly and then moving it back over here, like so cool now before. I do anything else. Let’s go ahead and fix up some of these strands here. So some of these are poking out like so. I’m just going to move that strand here just making sure that it all looks correct. Just some slight adjustments using the direct selection tool. And now what’s your happy with that shape what we can do is we can also duplicate these strands, so let’s go ahead and select everything and lets press ctrl C on the keyboard, and then Ctrl shift V to paste it. Move it all the way up to the top of our rope, and we wanted to go and right, click transform, reflect vertical and then do the same thing again, but this time we want to reflect it horizontally. Make sure it’s sent to back so right, click, arrange, send to back and the same with the bottom strands arrange of center back and then just move it into place so using the selection tool and then using the keyboard, just move it into place like so cool now we’ve got some top strands and some bottom strands. Let’s send the blue rectangle to the back, and we want to select both the rectangle and the rope, use the shape builder tool and this time we wanted to select all the shapes that are in the middle so press and hold shift on the keyboard, click and drag to highlight all the middle shapes. And then once you’ve released the shift key, you’ll see that everything has been selected. Turns blue select the blue shape using the direct selection tool and then hits the. Delete key on the keyboard to delete it. So just a quick check to see if there’s any small shapes which are poking out here, you can see, we’ve got a little bit over here, so let’s use a direct selection tool to delete those and you can see this shape. Here is actually part of the strands behind our rope. So if we delete that first, let’s go ahead and fix that. So just selecting the strands here. You can actually see which strand is responsible and just to make things easier. We can actually just move these down a little bit like so just checking if these are also doing the same thing, those are fine cool. So now we have a top rope, a bottom rope and a middle section, so select all of these shapes here, go to object, expand and click OK to create these shapes and now let’s go ahead and move our middle or the body segment of our rope into place like so awesome right now. Let’s go ahead and select all the shapes again and let’s rotate this by 90 degrees, so right, click transform rotate and put 90 degrees in here. Click on OK to rotate that, and now let’s go ahead and cut this so press ctrl + X to cut, and we wanted to create a new layer, so go to the layers section here, create a new layer and let’s go ahead and press ctrl shift V to paste this into place and let’s go ahead and select up just the body of our rope. Press ctrl X to cut this and then paste this in the original layer. So now we’ve got two layers, the first layer containing our body and the second layer containing our the end of our ropes, so the left and the right of our ropes here cool. Now we want to use the direct selection tool here, and we want to just go ahead and select one end of the Rope. So this hide the first layer here, so let’s go ahead and select the left side of the rope here. Press ctrl X to cut that create a new layer here, and then the rest press ctrl shift V to paste that. So now we’ve got three layers, each containing different parts of our rope, so there three is our left side. There are two is our right side, and there one is our middle cool. Now let’s go ahead and create some swatches for our brush so select layer 3 first and we’re going to use the selection tool to select all of this go to our swatches, panel, click and drag this into the swatches panel like so and now we’re going to do the same with layer two so select layer to select all of the shapes in there, click and drag this into the swatche’s panel. So now we’ve got to sort here one for the left and one for the right, and now let’s go ahead and focus on layer one. Which is our middle section here. Use the selection tool to select all of that, and now we want to go to the brushes panel, so go to window and select brushes here, and now we want to go ahead and select new brush so select new brush, select pattern, brush and click. OK, and now let’s go ahead and rename this rope. You can see here we’ve got. This is what our brush? Road brush is going to look like so he wants to create a nice round corner, so let’s select something like that and for our start tile and enter tile, we can actually use these swatches, so use the Swatch here for our start style, and for our end, tile can use that Swatch here like so, and you can see automatically. This has included our Swatch tiles here. We can also use the inner corner tile and let’s go ahead and choose either auto centered or auto between to fix that awesome. Now let’s go ahead and set the scale to 70% and then click. OK, awesome. We’ve now created the rope brush to use it. Simply select the pen tool and I’m just going to zoom out here a little bit, so we can see what we’re doing, and let’s create a line like, so once we’ve done that simply select the rope brush in our brushes panel to create our rope line, we can also adjust the thickness of the rope by increasing or decreasing the thickness of the stroke, so let’s go ahead and select the rope like so and over here, we can select the rope weight by increasing it or decreasing it like so excellent, and now let’s go ahead and just use the pen tool again just to create a little bit of a more complex line like so and again, select the rope brush in the brushes panel to see the results. Excellent, that’s it for this tutorial have fun, creating rope brushes in Illustrator and Ill. See you next time on Tuts plus you?