Creating an art brush

- So here we have our source files, and I've gone through and I've run Image Trace on the second, third and fourth brush tips. I left the first one and the last one as original source files. The first one is just a .PSD file with the white background, and the last one is actually a transparent .PSD, and that's "Chisel tip 05" in your exercise files. What we're going to do first is we're going to set up an art brush. So there are two ways that we can create an art brush. One, in Illustrator CC, we can now create art brushes based on raster files, so that's why I have two .PSD files here.

The other way is to use traditional vector files. So to start, I'm going to take a look at the raster file for "chisel tip 01". I'm simply going to select it and drag it over into my Brushes panel, and it asks me what kind of brush I want to create. I'm going to create an art brush for this, and hit OK. I'm going to name this "Chisel Tip 01 - Raster" just so I know that it is actually a raster source file. One nice thing is, if I'm using a Wacom tablet, I can change my width based on pen pressure, so I can give it a variety from small range, to a larger range, and then down below I really have this nice option for my brush scale.

Most people take for granted the fact that it says "Stretch to fit stroke length", meaning that it's just going to expand my brush the longer I go. Instead, I like to use "Stretch between guides", and what that allows me to do is go in and actually adjust these two guides on the left and right sides, to preserve the ends of my brush tip, and only expand the center. Now one thing to note when using a raster source file as your brush. The colorization method, even though it shows that it's available here, does not work.

The colorization method will always only honor the original brush color. So I'll always have this blue. If you want to continue to use raster source files, a great trick is to go back into Photoshop and just adjust your colors to get a variety of colors as needed. I'm going to hit OK, and I'm going to test this using my brush tool. Since I have a white background on here, guess what, I get a white background on my brush. That's not really going to work well for what I'm doing, so this brush, I'm going to eliminate.

And instead, I'm going to use the .psd file with transparency. So with transparency set from Photoshop, I can do the same thing, drag it in, and it gives me a warning saying that it has to be an embedded file. So if this is a linked file, simply go up to the top, click Embed in your Control Panel, and then flatten the layers into a single image. Hit OK, and then drag back into your Brushes panel. Again, choose Art Brush. And hit OK.

Stretch Between Guides. And this time, Colorization method did pick up a key color, but again, since this is a raster file, it won't work. So this is "Chisel Tip 05 - Raster". I'll hit OK. And now when I use my brush I have transparency. So this works out really well. Vector source files are even easier. Simply take your file, drag it over into the Brushes panel, Art Brush, this is "Chisel Tip 02" , and we'll set this one up again with our pressure.

"Stretch Between Guides". And this time, Colorization will work, so I'm going to choose "Tints and Shades". Hit OK. And test my brush. Now, Tints and Shades will pick up the color of my stroke, so if I change my color here, you can see I have a really nice brushstroke going on. So go ahead and import the rest of your brushes in here, in the next movie we'll go through and I'll show you how to save these out, after we've added in our pattern brushes.