Using the Blob Brush tool

From this point on, we'll be creating all of our path outlines, that is everything beyond this square and rectangular tiles, using what I consider to be one of the best but easily the most unfortunately named tool in all of Illustrator and that this guy right there, the Blob Brush tool. I say it's unfortunately named I think for obvious reasons I mean when is the last time you wanted to paint a blob inside of Illustrator or any other program for that matter. That name implies that you're going to paint goofy shapes with whacky effects whereas nothing could be farther from the truth.

Even though the Blob Brush was introduced in the previous version of Illustrator CS4, it has already proven itself to be the preeminent painting tool in the software, even better than the Paintbrush tool, which I quite like, which allows you to paint organic brush strokes that look like they were created with chalk or charcoal or that kind of thing. However, if what you want to do is create a custom path outline without resorting to the Pen tool then the Blob Brush is your best bet. So I am going to spend the next couple of exercises showing you how the tool works and then we will begin to paint the intricate patterns inside of our tiles.

I am going switch over to Tiles layer complete.ai, so called because the tiles layer here inside the Layers panel is indeed complete. This file, which represents my progress so far is found inside the 06_transform folder. Now what I recommend you do at this point, just to make sure that you don't mess up anything inside of your Illustration so far, recommend you go over to the Layers panel and lock down that tiles layer by clicking in the Lock column. Then click on the drawing layer to make it active and then finally, notice the Fill and Stroke attributes up here in the Control panel.

Press the D key in order to reset the default attributes and we will now begin to paint with those attributes using the Blob Brush. So I will select the Blob Brush either by clicking on it or pressing Shift+B and then I'll paint a new path outline and notice, right off the bat, I want you to see that the default Fill attribute is white, the default Stroke attribute is black. When I paint a new brushstroke, it comes in using the default stroke attribute, even though if I now grab my Black Arrow tool and I click on the path outline, I've created a closed path that is actually filled with black, the former Stroke attribute.

So that's just something to bear in mind when you're using the tool. It does go for the Stroke attribute right off the bat. Now after this point, its designed to merge paths that share the same attribute. So if I grab that Blob Brush once again and I, for example, start brushing in like so along the edge of this existing path outline, then I am going to go ahead and expand the outline, making it a great sketching tool as you can see. Only you can't see because by default Illustrator goes ahead and deselects the path after you paint it, which I think is a bad idea.

If you share my thoughts, then what I want you to do is double click on the Blob Brush tool icon here inside the toolbox to bring up this dialog box, and then turn on to the Keep Selected checkbox, which I quite recommend, by the way. This is the way I suggest you work inside of this file and then go ahead and click OK. Now notice, if I paint some more inside of this brush stroke like so and I can paint over any elements that I want. When I release, Illustrator goes ahead and selects the path for me. I can also join different paths to each other, if I want to.

So if I paint away from the previous brush stroke, I'll paint an independent path and then if I paint back and forth between them like so, I will join them together into one. Alright, I am going to press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to delete the mess I have created so far. Another thing you can do when working with this tool is as you can change the brush size by pressing the square Bracket keys which are immediately to the right of the P as in Paul key on an American keyboard. So if you press and hold the Right Bracket key, you'll make the brush bigger. If you press and hold the Left Bracket key, you'll make the brush smaller.

And then at this point, I could paint a big thick brush stroke like so. Another thing you can do, just in case you want more control over the tool, I'll go ahead and press the Backspace key or Delete once again. Double-click on the Brush tool icon in order to bring up this big old dialog box and turn on Merge Only with Selection. And that way you'll only merge brush strokes that are selected inside of the Illustration window. So click OK, if I paint a new brush stroke over here, obviously, it's going to be independent. If I paint a brush stroke over in this area, it's going to be independent as well.

Notice now, the left-hand brush stroke is selected but the right-hand brush stroke is deselected. If I paint over the right-hand brush stroke, I create a new independent path because the right brush stroke was not selected. If I then switch over to the Black Arrow tool and Shift+click on the left-hand brush stroke like so, then switch back to the Blob Brush tool and paint between these two selected brush strokes, I will join them together but that deselected path in the background remains independent. So it's up to you how you work.

In the next exercise, I am going to show you how to use the Blob Brush with a pressure sensitive stylus.