Introducing the Brushes panel

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the brushes panel and we'll see examples of each of the five kinds of brushes you can create inside Illustrator. Now for those of you who are interested in following along with the project, we're going to start with this very basic piece of artwork here, and we're going to turn it into this fully blown piece of fabric art. And with the exception of a single tile pattern, which I'll show you how to create in the very next chapter, everything you're seeing is a function of brushes, even this text up here at the top and bottom of the artwork.

Alright so, there's a couple of ways to use brushes inside Illustrator. One is to use the Paintbrush Tool. And if you followed along with the fundamentals course, you may recall that I switched the keyboard shortcuts between the Blob Brush, which I quite prefer, and the Paintbrush Tool. So that's just something bear in mind. And then you want to go up to the control panel and click on this middle menu right here and select whatever brush it is you want to use. In my case, I'm going to grab one I've created in advance, which is called 30 point pressure.

Now you also want to note that you're going to paint in the stroke color. So I'm going to go ahead and click on the second swatch here, and change it to white, so I end up painting with white. I'm also going to turn off the big type layer, just so it doesn't get in the way. Now I happen to be armed with a Wacom Cintiq with a pressure-sensitive stylus, which is a screen that you can paint directly on. And I'll just go ahead and paint a brush stroke here. And right now I'm painting very light, but if I press harder I will end up creating a thicker brush stroke like so.

And so for those of you who like to draw that is one way to work. But brushes are actually much more flexible than just the Paintbrush Tool. You can apply them to any path outline you can create inside Illustrator. And so I'm just going to press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'll click on this path outline to select it, and then I'll just press the Backspace key, or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of it. And I'll bring back my type, and then I'll go ahead and click on this path outline that I've created in advance.

And now let's say you want to apply a brush stroke to it, then you can go up to this side and once again, this middle menu, up here in the control panel. Or you can bring up the dedicated brushes panel by going to the Window menu and choosing the Brushes command. And notice it has a keyboard shortcut of F5, which is the very same shortcut at work inside Photoshop. Alright so, I'll go ahead and bring out my brushes. And things start off up here at the top with the calligraphic brushes. And so I could apply that same one that I brushed in a moment ago, just by clicking on it.

Now in this case, we're working with a path that I created with the Pen Tool, so there's no pressure information, but as we'll see in a future movie you can simulate pressure using the Width tool. Alright the next set of brushes, so these guys right here, the Scatter Brushes. And so notice if I click on this 3D Geometric 2 item, that I will see a series of objects that are scattered along the path outline. So there's space between the objects. We're seeing them actually at different angles, and they're scattered to various distances toward and away from the path outline.

Now the next item, Basic, is actually no brush, and so if you click on it, you're going to reestablish a uniform brush stroke. So you're going to actually remove the brush from the path outline. Next we have a long list of what are known as Art Brushes, and these are my favorite variety of brush. What they allow you to do is stretch one or more path outlines along the length of another path. And so if I were to apply this guy here, Grunge Brush Vector Path 01, then I would create what appears to be an organic brush stroke here inside the vector-based world of Illustrator.

So these things are very flexible indeed. Alright, I'm going to bring back the Brushes panel, and I'm going to scroll down to the next type of brush, which is the Bristle Brush. Bristle Brush is sort of designed to emulate real world brushes. They work best when you combine them with the Paintbrush tool and a pressure-sensitive stylus, but you can apply them to standard path outlines as well. And what we really have now is a collection of paths set to different opacity levels that are all combined with one another.

And then finally, we've got Pattern Brushes. And so if I click on this one right here, African, you can see it applies a repeating pattern across the length of the path outline. Now some kinds of brushes are going to work along with the current path color. Others aren't, as in the case of this pattern brush. But they all respond to the line weight. So if I wanted to make this path thicker, all I would have to do is take that line weight value up to for example, three points, and I would end up with a bigger pattern, as we're seeing right here.

Now the other thing to know about brushes is just as with swatches, they're saved along with the active document. But if you want to access more of them, all you have to do is click on the Libraries icon down here on the bottom left corner of the panel, and then choose one of these libraries, such as Bristle Brush. And then just go ahead and click on a desired item in order to not only apply it to the active path outline, but also permanently add it to your Brushes panel, after which point, assuming you're done with this floating panel, you can go ahead and close it.

And for the most part, that's exactly what I did in order to assemble this long list of brushes that are included along with this file. And that is my introduction to the Brushes panel, as well as the five kinds of brushes, Calligraphic, Scatter, Art, Bristle, and Pattern, that are available to you here inside Illustrator.