Section Five Brush Up On Your Tool Skills 42
Section Five Brush Up On Your Tool Skills 42
Section Five Brush Up On Your Tool Skills 42
SECTION FIVE
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There are various drawing tools available in Illustrator which can be used to help in the creation of natural media drawings. The Pencil tool enables you to draw freeform paths on screen in a much looser and more expressive way than with the Pen tool, and its great for creating quick, sketch-like images.
The Pencil tool also has a few nifty features up 2 its sleeve. For example, if you draw a line while its still selected, you can redraw over part of the line to immediately edit it. Make sure that you start on part of the line or you might draw a new path, depending on the Pencil tool options.
in the Pencil toolset. Alternatively, if you still have the Pencil tool active, hold down Option to change from the Pencil tool to the Smooth tool. Draw over a part of a selected path to smooth it out.
the Smooth tool, just draw over the part of the path you want to remove. You can also use the Eraser tool to remove parts of brushed paths.
relevant icon in the toolset. The Fidelity value controls how closely the path will reflect the actual line you draw. Lower settings produce more points along the path and will follow your drawing more closely, while higher settings will produce smoother lines with fewer points.
settings produce rougher paths; higher settings result in smoother paths. There are also options to keep the path selected once its drawn, and you can change how close you need to be near a path to be able to edit it.
The Paintbrush tool works in a similar way to the Pencil tool, except that it enables you to create paths which are painted with a brush selected from the Brushes palette. The options are almost identical to those of the Pencil tool, with the added feature of being able to fill new brush strokes.
which are useful for creating natural media effects: calligraphy brushes recreate calligraphic type strokes; scatter brushes place copies of artwork along the path and can be used to create splashes and paint-like marks; art brushes stretch artwork along the length of the path and are great for creating a whole range of marks.
with simple lines and apply different brushes to see how they can change the look of your artwork rapidly. Select the paths to which you want to apply brushes and then click on a brush in the Brushes palette.
pattern. These can be used to apply art to selected paths in your work. You can use or modify the preset brushes or you can easily create your own.
data becomes associated with the current file. You can make multiple brushes in one file to compile libraries of brushes for example, you could create a library file with various ink-like brushes.
create brushes which are made up of plainfilled or stroked shapes (although transparency settings can be applied too). If you try to create brushes from artwork including elements which cant be turned into brushes, an error dialog will appear.
Calligraphy brushes can be used to create spontaneous painterly and calligraphic marks. If you have a graphics tablet then you can create highly variable and responsive marks by altering the pressure settings for the various options in the Calligraphic Brush Options dialog.
New Brush dialog, select New Calligraphic Brush. The Calligraphic Brush Options dialog enables you to name your brush and customise it in a variety of ways. The preview windows show the state of the current brush.
the arrowhead, and the dots on the black ellipse enable you to vary the roundness of the stroke. The right-hand preview shows the effects of the angle, roundness and diameter settings.
By changing the fixed settings to Random (or 4 Pressure if you have a graphics tablet), you can add variety to brush strokes. When choosing Random, you can use the Variation slider to alter how the brush will look. The grey ellipses in the right-hand preview show the minimum and maximum variations.
Click OK to accept your settings, then click on 5 your new brush in the Brushes palette to apply it to selected paths. You can customise existing and newly created calligraphic brushes by double-clicking on them in the Brushes palette. This will open the options again with a Preview check button, so that you can see how your variations affect your artwork.
want to remove a brush from the Brushes palette, select it and click on the trash icon at the lower-right of the palette, or choose Delete Brush from the Brushes palette options.
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Scatter brushes can be created from artwork to make strokes that resemble paint-like drips and dabs or brush-like marks. You can change various options, such as size, spacing and rotation, to quickly alter the look of any given scatter brush. You also have access to colouring options.
Brushes palette options. Choose New Scatter Brush to open the Scatter Brush Options dialog. You can rename the brush if you want to, and you get a preview of the artwork used in the scatter brush.
scatter brush. If you change the fixed amounts to Random (or Pressure if you have a graphics tablet), you can create a huge variety of marks from one brush. By dragging the sliders, you can set the minimum and maximum values.
Art brushes are a useful way of creating strokes which can resemble a whole range of natural-media-type marks, from pen and ink to painterly strokes. Art brushes can be created in a variety of ways experimentation is the key. Here are a number of methods and tips to get you started.
Image>Adjustments>Levels to clean up the marks and save out to open up in Illustrator. You can then use these images as template layers to help recreate the look of the mark in Illustrator.
click on its layer and, in the Layers palette options, choose Template to fade and lock the image. This makes it much easier to draw over. If you doubleclick the layer, youll open the Layer Options, which enable you to change the Dim amount, making it more or less faded.
marks. Its often a good idea to use the merge pathfinder on the selected artwork to remove any overlaps in the artwork, because displaying complicated brushes can severely affect your display performance.
You can use the Auto-Trace tool in Illustrator 5 to quickly generate artwork for use in brushes. Clicking on various areas of the mark will create paths from which you can create brush artwork. Use the selection tools to move and manipulate these paths to approximate the mark youre using. Once again, use the merge pathfinder to remove unwanted paths.
A great tip is to use the Filter>Distort menu to 6 create interesting marks from selected artwork. The Roughen and Scribble & Tweak filters are great for giving artwork a rough sketchy feel. Use the sliders to alter the artwork until youre happy with the results. Experiment and see what you can come up with yourself.
Brush from the Brushes palette options, then choose Art Brush to open the Art Brush Options dialog box. You can rename the brush if you wish.
brush direction. You can change this setting using the Direction buttons to alter the angle in which you want your artwork to be drawn when you create a brush stroke.
a percentage setting. Choosing Proportional keeps the proportion of the brush stroke the same as the original brush artwork.
colour of the applied brush. Colorisation can be applied to scatter art as well as pattern brushes. Choosing None keeps the brush colours as they were when the brush was created.
colours the brush using the stroke colour but retains black and white, while Hue Shift uses the key colour as shown in the Key Colour box. Anything in the brush that uses the key colour becomes the same as the stroke colour, and other colours relate to this stroke colour.
individual brush strokes by simply changing the colour of the stroke used. You can build up a variety of effects if you apply Transparency and Blending modes to brush artwork as you create it or to applied brush strokes.
Click on OK to accept the brush settings and store your new brush in the Brushes palette. You can double-click on any brush in the palette to edit it at a later stage. If you do so, a dialog box will appear with options which show how your changes will affect selected artwork.
your artwork, with the modified brush settings. Itll apply them to new brush strokes too.
the modified brush alone, but will apply the modifications to new brush strokes.
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You can also change the options for individual 4 brush strokes in your artwork. Select the brush stroke you want to modify and choose the options you want from the Brushes palette options, then apply your changes as necessary.
Brushes palette to the artboard, youll drag a copy of the original artwork which makes up the brush into your file. You can then edit this in the same way you would any other artwork, using the selection tools and/or drawing tools.
Another way to edit an existing brush stroke 6 is to first select it in your artwork and then choose Object>Expand Appearance. This will convert the current brush stroke as it appears into editable elements. Note that when you do this, the original brush stroke path is retained, but with no Fill and Stroke settings.
Brush libraries are used for organising and storing existing brushes or brushes which you create. You can open up a brush library at any time and bring brushes into the current Brushes palette to apply to artwork in the document.
can choose Other Library to find brush libraries which are not stored within the Brushes folder (found in the Presets folder inside the Illustrator application folder).
palette, as well as enabling you to create, duplicate and delete brushes. The Select All Unused option is useful for selecting unused brushes in your document, so you can remove them from the palette and keep it uncluttered.
selected brush, you need to add it to your current Brushes palette. Simply click on the brush in the brush library and it should appear in the Brushes palette. Alternatively, apply it to artwork in your file or drag the desired brush to the Brushes palette.
them in the Brushes palette. In fact, you can delete any other artwork in the file, because its only the contents of the Brushes palette of a file which determines the contents of the brush library.
menu, save or copy the file into the Brushes folder, found in the Preset folder of Illustrator. The next time you start up the application, you can access your new library in the Brush Libraries menu.
The first step in creating this illustration was to take a number of digital shots of hands holding various drawing utensils in different poses. The hands were then cut out and arranged into a pleasing composition using the Layers palette and the Free Transform tools.
These were then cleaned up and saved out as separate files to use as reference in recreating the look of the specific marks in Illustrator.
opened in Illustrator and the layer was turned into a template using the Layers palette options to help with the next step of tracing the hands.
loose manner. Breaks were left among some of the lines to suggest a sketchier look. Fidelity was set to 1 pixel and Smoothness set to 2 per cent in the Pencil tool preferences.
Pencil, Smooth and Pen tools. On certain hands, embellishments were made, such as overlapping lines, broken lines and lines to suggest form.
techniques. Some were created using paths made in Photoshop, others by manually recreating the feel of the mark using drawing tools and filters. The Pathfinder>Merge and Path>Simplify commands were used to prevent some brushes from becoming too complicated.
At this point, the various brushes were collated 7 and saved as brush library files. You can find these on the cover CD along with the rest of the tutorial files and extra brush files. The libraries were then loaded into the multiple hands file and applied to different hands.
multiple brushes could be applied, and various shading-like marks were created to add interest to the hands. The great thing about using the brushes is that you can make drastic changes to an image fairly rapidly, so youve got more time to experiment and create a number of different variations.
suggest a sketchbook-like quality to the illustration and tie in the whole composition. Unused brushes were selected using the brush palette options and removed to save on overall file size. The final file was then saved. cap
Section Five Brush up on your tool skills 49