Creating Custom Brushes in Illustrator

In my recent article at CreativePro.com about Illustrator’s Paintbrush tool, I noted that its true power comes from the brushes it can use. Using custom brushes with the Paintbrush, you can quickly create highly detailed artwork—whether you need to draw from scratch or apply embellishments to existing paths. Let’s look at how to make your own custom brushes and get the most out of them.

Starting Out

Reveal the Brushes panel by choosing Window > Brushes. The + button at the bottom is for creating new brushes, or you can choose New Brush from the panel menu (Figure 1).

Illustrator supports five brush types:

• Calligraphic brushes enable you to draw and apply lines with rounded or angled strokes. These work particularly well in conjunction with a pen tablet for creating hand-lettering.
• Scatter brushes distribute copies of a pre-made object along a path. They’re great for designs depicting a multitude of items, such as foliage or confetti.
• Art brushes stretch a single shape along a path. The beginnings and endings can be fixed so they remain proportional. These are well suited for brushstrokes that simulate charcoal, chalk, or ink.
• Bristle brushes create brush strokes with multiple bristles using 10 preset shapes that are each fully configurable. These brushes impart a natural media look to your artwork.
• Pattern brushes also distribute artwork along a path like Scatter brushes, but
  
  with more control. These brushes use individual tiles with optional separate designs for corners, beginnings, and endings. Pattern brushes are great for making borders.

As you create new custom brushes, Illustrator saves them with your document, so they remain available to someone else who opens your file on a different computer.

A Showcase of Brushes from the Libraries

Illustrator’s libraries offer many brushes in every category. Using these is a great starting point for exploring how brushes behave and how their settings work. Here are some of my favorites.

• Arrows: Standard and Special: Arrows are useful for diagramming and annotating artwork. Most of the brushes in these libraries are built as Art brushes. Some maintain their appearance regardless of a path’s length or weight, while others stretch or resize proportionally. This makes arrows great for exploring brush scale options (figure 2).

• Artistic Brushes: The Artistic Brush libraries are diverse. The first set are Calligraphic brushes, and I load these regularly to use the Flat brushes for handwriting. The second library includes 19 Art brushes simulating marks from chalk, charcoal, and pencils. Then there are ink, paintbrush, scroll pen and watercolor brushes. I love using brushes that simulate softer media like chalk and watercolors to create natural-looking backgrounds (figure 3).

• Bristle Brushes: The Bristle Brush library contains 14 brushes. To see how a Mop brush differs from a Deerfoot, or what a Stippler stroke looks like, simply start painting (figure 4).

• Borders: The seven Border libraries showcase the power and beauty of pattern brushes. Try overlaying two identical rectangles and assigning different borders to each to create unique combinations. Border brushes are also great for experimenting with tints and shades, so you don’t have to settle for the given colors (figure 5).

• Decorative Scatter Brushes: It’s a lot of fun to play with this library in the Decorative category. Who doesn’t love adding confetti and stars to their artwork? Apply the Star 1 brush to a simple path (set the Brush panel to List view to find it easily), and you’ll see what a very random scatter looks like. Click the brush repeatedly and watch the results (figure 6).

Creating Calligraphic and Bristle Brushes

Let’s start with two brush types that don’t require pre-made artwork. You’ll find all the brush configuration options in the dialog boxes that appear after you select New Brush and choose either Calligraphic Brush or Art Brush.

Calligraphic brushes

Calligraphic brushes are perfect for artists who love drawing, writing, and lettering with pens that offer an endless choice of nibs. The options for Calligraphic brushes (Figure 7) let you set the Angle, Roundness, and Size of the brush. In the Brush Shape Editor area of the Calligraphic Brush Options dialog box, you can click or drag to set the Angle (hold Shift to constrain to 15° increments) and/or drag the small black dots to set the Roundness.

Note that these properties can be fixed, vary randomly, or be determined by the pressure, bearing, tilt, or rotation of a drawing stylus. You can also use the stylus wheel to control these properties while you draw. To see how the brush you’re working on looks on any currently selected artwork, turn on the Preview option.

Bristle brushes

Representing a completely different medium than Calligraphic brushes, Bristle brushes simulate painted brush strokes that can be layered on one another, as with watercolors or gouache, and leave visible trails from the bristles. When choosing to create a new Bristle brush, first select one of 10 brush shapes from the menu (Figure 8). Then set values for the brush size and stiffness, paint opacity, and the bristles’ length, density, and thickness (Figure 9). These values are fixed for each brush, with a preview of the resulting stroke displayed above them. It’s always a good idea to give your brushes descriptive names. You can do this when you create them or double-click a brush in the Brushes panel to change its name and revisit the other options. Calligraphic and Bristle brushes apply the active stroke color when used, and Bristle brushes use the current Paint Opacity value. The best way to get a feel for them is to experiment with different settings and see the results (Figure 10).

Brushes Based on Artwork

You will need a path or object to create one of the next three brush types: Scatter, Pattern, and Artwork. You can use multiple paths with any solid color fills and/or strokes, but gradients and patterns won’t work. Both vector artwork and embedded (not linked) raster images can serve as the basis for one of these brushes. You can also use text that has been converted to outlines. To create one of these brushes, start by selecting your artwork and choosing New Brush or by dragging the artwork directly into the Brushes panel.

Scatter brushes

You can magically paint with a multitude of shapes—precisely or randomly—using a Scatter brush. The Size, Spacing, Scatter, and Rotation values can be fixed, or they can vary (Figure 11). When you choose any of the options for varying the brush (Random, Pressure, Tilt, and so on), you can set ranges with maximum and minimum values. In addition, you can set the scattered artwork’s rotation relative to the page or the path. The Path option makes scattered artwork directional. Again, to get a sense of how to combine all the options to make the look you want, you need to spend some time playing around with them (Figure 12).

Scatter brushes can also make use of Colorization settings. The Method is set to None by default, which preserves the original artwork’s colors. Click the lightbulb icon for a visual guide to the colorization options (Figure 13), and set a key color if desired.

Pattern brushes

There is no better brush for borders and ornamentation than a Pattern brush, as it lets you paint with repeating tiles while offering a variety of appearance options for corners. Start creating a new Pattern brush with your selected artwork by setting the Scale and Spacing options at the top of the dialog box (Figure 14). Below that, you’ll find a row of five sets of controls for the various pattern tiles. The main pattern tile used by the brush is second from the left; it’s the artwork you selected when you started. The remaining tiles are optional for inner corners, as well as the beginning and ending of the path.

When it comes to corners, you have several options to choose from. Illustrator auto-generates four options from your selected artwork for outer and inner corners: Auto-Centered, Auto-Between, Auto-Sliced, and Auto-Overlap. As you experiment with these, you can see the results in the preview box (Figure 15). Alternatively, you can choose a totally different corner design from the Pattern Swatches library, which appears as you scroll in the tile menu. The artwork for the brush can be flipped, and you can also control the path fitting, which will affect the fidelity of your artwork. For example, if your main pattern tile consists of a perfect circle, Stretch to Fit and Approximate Path can produce ovals along the stroke. To maintain perfect circles try Add Space to Fit. Colorization options are the same as for Scatter brushes. The large preview at the bottom left of the Pattern Brush Options dialog box shows what your brush will look like when applied to a path. Remember to name your brush before clicking OK!

Art brushes

For ultimate control over the appearance of a stroke, create an Art brush from anything you can draw or scan. As for Pattern and Scatter brushes, you can use any selected artwork in your document to make Art brushes. Because the strokes they produce stretch the art along a path (see the sidebar “How Brush Types Affect Your Artwork”), however, they work particularly well when you start out with a linear shape (Figure 16). This can be a mark you create directly in Illustrator.

You can also use traditional tools, such as paint or ink on paper or canvas, scan that artwork into Illustrator, and optionally trace it to convert it to vector art (Figures 17 and 18). For complex artwork with a lot of detail, making the artwork into a compound path (Object > Compound Path > Make) is your best bet. Using the same options as for Calligraphic brushes, you can set the width of the Art brush to Fixed or to vary with, for example, pen pressure or tilt. Under Scale options, the third choice allows you to preserve your artwork’s beginning, end, or both—perfect for creating custom arrows. Choose this option, and guides appear that you can adjust directly in the preview box. Next, set the direction of your strokes, flip the artwork, and control how overlaps are handled when a brushed path changes direction. Colorization options are the same as for Scatter and Pattern brushes. If you want an Art brush to use the stroke color you set, choose a colorization option other than None.

Bonus Tips

Here are a couple extra tips to enhance your experience with custom Illustrator brushes.

Create a multicolor brush

After creating or applying a brushstroke to a path, you can drag it into the Brushes panel and create another brush. You heard that right: You can build custom Scatter, Pattern, and Art brushes with artwork to which other brushstrokes were previously applied. Using brushstrokes to build other brushes enables you to create complex, unique images. With this technique, you can create a multi-colored brush. Here are the steps:

1. Draw several straight brushstrokes with Art brushes.
2. The Artistic_Paintrush library included with Illustrator has a number of good brushes for this purpose. Access it from the Brushes panel menu by choosing Open Brush Library > Artistic > Artistic_Paintbrush.
3. Apply different colors to the strokes.
4. Move the strokes close together, stacked however you like.
5. Select all and create a new Art brush. Set the options, save the new brush, and try it out! (Figure 19)

How to share custom brushes via CC Libraries

Given Adobe’s focus on getting users to adopt Creative Cloud services into their workflows, you wouldn’t think it would be difficult to add and share a custom brush via a CC Library. And in truth, it’s not hard, but it is obscure, because you can’t add brushes directly to a Library. Simply dragging or choosing Place Linked will not add the object’s brush to the Brushes panel. Instead, you need to drag an object with the brush applied to a CC Library. To access the brush in a new document, right-click the Library item and choose Place Copy (or Option/Alt-drag to the artboard). Note that this also adds any color swatches used in the brush to the document’s Swatches panel.

Brushing Up

With five types of brushes at your disposal, and many options for customizing them, you can draw, paint, and decorate in any style. Create your own brushes, explore the brush libraries and don’t be afraid to modify the brush options. Remember that brushes and their modifications are saved with your document, and you can share them in CC Libraries or as brush library files. Go forth, and brush up your artwork!

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