In this lesson you'll learn how to create a custom brush and how to use a
custom brush in the context of logo design. So these are just a couple of quick
examples I made using a custom brush. I made pretty quickly and it adds
a little bit more personality than just a default brush to a shape. So go ahead and
go to File, New in Adobe Illustrator and you can just click OK.
Default size is fine and I'm going to hide the artboard here so we have more workspace to work with.
And so first thing we need to do is to create some kind of shape that we
want to convert then into a brush. So I'm going to use the Pen tool and just click, click and
drag, it's kind of a slightly curved shape here. Something like that, and then I'm going to add
just a Fill and no Stroke.
We want it to look specifically straight up or straight sideways, one or the other.
So I'm just going to set this so it's looking pretty close to straight up. So what you need to do to
create a custom shape in Adobe Illustrator is to click right up here,
it says Brushes. If you don't have that up there for some reason, you can just go to
Window then Brushes
and you'll see some default here and you can click here and open up, Open Brush Library,
there's a bunch there as well. But to create a new one, all you need to do is, as long
as this is selected, you don't have to go to any other thing. Just make sure it' s
selected then click on New Brush, right there and it's off the screen little bit
but basically it's the very top thing where it says New Brush. So let me actually
pull it over so you can see. So New Brush right there and make this one an art
brush and it will bring up this menu and we need to set ours to Straight Up, so click that third one.
So what that means is as you draw with the Brush tool or create some kind of shape
with the path with the Pen tool for example, it's going to be in that direction.
So click OK,
and I can delete this and now we've got our custom brush right there. So I'm going
to draw some kind of wave with the Pen tool. Click, click and drag.
Let's say this is for some kind of surf company
or something like that and then I'm going to make it so there's no Fill but
there is a Stroke and then apply this brush. All you have to do was select it and then
it applies it over there and you can adjust it obviously after the fact.
If you want to move some of this stuff around, so you might be thinking, OK,
I want this in a different color.
Well see how it doesn't change it. And what if you want to actually adjust the edge of
it here after you've drawn it? Well, that's pretty easy. Just go to Object and
then Path and then Outline Stroke right there. What that means is, it's going to outline it,
kind of like we outlined text just by right clicking or CTRL clicking over it but instead of a
outlining text, this is going to outline a Stroke of a path. There's a bit too many points on that but it
gives us this option now of adding a new color and we can also adjust the edge and
you can go through, if we want to adjust those points, you can delete some of the
anchor points, add in some other ones and so on. So that's how you add a custom brush to
use in the context of logo design. I'm going to do one more real quick. Let's just create... instead
of drawing with the Pen tool, I'm actually going to make a star here. You can drag it
out and then instead of, while it's selected, go to here, New Brush, you can actually just
click and drag it over on top. See how it turns into that little plus sign. That's another way to
add a new one, and notice we can't do Calligraphic
Brush or Bristle Brush with this selected but we can do Scatter brush, Art Brush, Pattern Brush.
So now if I just click Add New Brush, then I can. So if you use that shortcut, it will let you add certain kinds.
but, let's just say, Art Brush for this one. Click OK and then click OK and now I can
use the Brush tool. Click and drag. It looks kind of funky. I don't know if you'd use this
in the context of logo design but just to show you how this works. It just stretches
it out because that's the options that we had. So have fun with that, creating some custom
brushes. Again, you can access a large library of brushes in the Brush Library here.
So you just click this top right hand corner, Brushes panel, Open Brush library and
there's a bunch of them in there that we can check out as well.
Alright. Thanks and I'll see you in the next lesson.