Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to another. Every Tuesday tutorial in this week’s tutorial, we are going to be creating some watercolor brushes in Illustrator. So a few weeks ago, I showed you my process for creating a watercolor brush in Photoshop, and then last week we created some ribbon brushes and illustrator, so we’re gonna kind of combine both of them and even if you’re new to illustrator this tutorial. If you followed along last week, this one will be a perfect follow-up tutorial, so I would highly encourage you to give this one a try it, plus they come out really cool, and they’re so fun to use so first things first. These textures are from some of my different water, color, texture kits. I’ll leave a link on screen and in the video description. If you’d like to check them out, they’re all high-re’s textures. They’re all cut out from their background, so it’ll. Save you a ton of time if this is something that you’re interested in doing if you’d like to use your own watercolor textures. I have an entire class that goes over my process for removing the background, so leave a link to that on screen and in the video description as well. And finally, if you’d like to save these out and use them at a later time. I’ll link to a video on how to save your brushes, so you can use them in any document in the future that you’d like. I’ll leave a link to that video on-screen and in the video description as well. Okay, oh, that’s out of the way now. Let’s have some fun so. I’ve already created these ones. I want to show you how they work, so I’ve got these four textures and all I have to do is come over to my brushe’s, palette and select the brush that I want and then hit B on my keyboard for my brush tool, and then I can draw with my watercolor. How cool is that so fun? And you can draw all kinds of different things, depending on the size of your watercolor texture when you bring it in will determine how big it appears. So if I wanted these to be smaller, all I have to do is come over here to my stroke palette, which you can get to by going window stroke and you can scale down the weight. So if I do a half a point instead of a full point, you can see these get a lot skinnier, so it all depends on what you prefer. Just remember the bigger this texture is before you make your brush that’ll determine how big it ends up being when you start using it, okay, so. I’m hit B on my keyboard. I’m going to show you these other ones, and then I’ll show you exactly how I made them. So here’s the pink, one kind of pretty and fun lets. Pump this one up. So you can see this one nice and big too, so that’s pretty cool. You can make some really cool dividers with it or even draw some fun illustrations with it. If you wanted to do like a flower or something super fun. Alright, the Purple One. Let’s grab that one. This one was brought in kind of large, too, so you can see this one’s a much softer texture, so you can kind of see this really pretty gradient that happens when you stretch it out in a brush form. And then finally, this green one down here. I’ll draw this one out really soft and beautiful. This one was probably brought in the largest, so that’s. Why it’s looking gigantic right there? But once again, all you do is select it and reduce the size of the stroke right here, and then it’ll reduce the appearance of it right there, so these are really cool, so I’m going to show you how I made them, and I’m gonna grab some different textures, so I can stay in the same document here, so all you have to do is bring in a watercolor texture that’s on a transparent background that could be a PSD file that has a transparent background or it can be a transparent PNG, which these are it just makes for a bit of a smaller file size, which is much easier to work with, but that’s the important thing your texture has to start out having a transparent background, which all my water color texture kits have those, so they’re all set to go so. I’m going to go file place and I’m going to choose some textures, so I’m gonna start out with my volume number three, a texture kit, and I’m gonna grab my transparent textures. Let’s see, lets. Find a cool one. That one looks pretty cool, let’s use. I think that’s some looks pretty cool. Let’s try this one out and see what it looks like so. I’ll hit place, so this one was number 15 in that texture kit, and I’m just gonna scale it down a little bit, and we know already that the smaller it starts out the smaller it will begin at when we’re using it so. I want to reduce this down quite a bit, so when you have the size that you like the next thing we need to do is rasterize it, so you’re gonna come over here and go object, Mr. Eyes, And when this pops up the most important thing to make sure of is that transparent is selected. Right here for your background, so make sure that’s like that and then hit. OK, and then you can come over here to your brushe’s palette. It’s got to be selected, still, so make sure that’s selected and then click this little icon down here for a new brush and then when this pops up, choose art brush hit. OK, make sure you have stretch to fit stroke. Length right here. You can name this. I’ll do purple purpley pink and then down here where it has the overlap make sure this icon is selected and not this one. Otherwise it’ll look funky when it overlaps on top of it on top of itself. So make sure this is selected. I like having my direction go from left to right, just because that’s kind of how I draw, so make sure that’s selected, too. If you’d like to do that as well and then just hit. OK, and now we’ve got the brush added over here in our brushes. So now I can deselect it. I can hit B on my keyboard for brush. Make sure your new brush is selected in your brushe’s palette, and then you can just draw with it right away, So it looks really freaking cool. So yeah, really fun. I could just fit here and do this for forever so fun. Alright, so we’ll do a softer one just to show you the comparison, but that’s all it is. It’s a super easy process. And you get some really. I catching results out of it, which is always nice, so lets. Go file place. We’ll select a texture from water, color, texture, hip volume. -, these ones have softer textures overall, so I’m going to come over here. Transparent, PNG s and let’s grab a softer texture. Let’s grab, so let’s grab this soft 0-5 texture and we’re just going to place it in. We’re going to scale it down, so I’m just holding shift and I’m holding alt at the same time, and that’ll scale it proportionally all at once, all the sides. So I’m going to get this kind of tiny right here, and then I’m gonna go object once again. Rasterize make sure transparent is selected for the background hit. OK, then hit the little new brush icon in your brushe’s. Palette, choose art brush hit. Okay, come over here. Make sure it’s a stretch to fit stroke length. I’m gonna do orange soft and make sure the overlap. I kind of still selected and hit. Okay, and now we can hit B on our keyboard. Make sure our new brush is selected over here, and now you can start drawing with it and you can see this one’s already smaller than the last one because we started out much smaller. So if I wanted these to be larger, I could just select them, go to my stroke palate and up the size of the stroke, and then you can see the results are looking pretty cool. If you go too far, they start becoming a little geometric, so just a heads up on that. The closer you are to the original size. The smoother your edges are going to be so looks pretty cool. So that is how to create a water color texture brush in Illustrator. Super easy, most important things to make sure are that you’re using watercolor textures that have their backgrounds removed and once again. I have a course that shows you exactly how I remove the backgrounds off my textures, and I’ll leave a link in the video description to that as well as a link to all three of my water color texture kits. If you’d like to have a peek at those, thanks so much for watching if you enjoy this tutorial, please subscribe and don’t forget to head on over to my blog every – Tuesday to calm for even more design tutorials and a bunch of design freebies. Thanks again for watching, and I will see you next week.