The Paintbrush tool in Illustrator works a little bit differently than the Brush
tool in Photoshop. In this lesson you'll learn about the Paintbrush tool and also the
Blob Brush tool, how to customize them and what are the differences between the two.
So I just have a new document here.
Landscape Orientation, Letter Size and if you click and hold, you'll see here the
Paintbrush tool. The shortcut is B then SHIFT B is the Blob Brush tool.
So the Paintbrush tool, if I just click and drag over here, it's going to draw a stroke out here.
So basically, what that is is if I select the white arrow, the Direct Selection tool,
afterwards and select it, you'll see it's added some anchor points and it's got
paths in between the anchor points and we can still adjust it after the fact like so.
And we can also adjust the handles, the angle of those curves and move the paths
and the anchor points and so on. Now if want to change the color of this, I could
select it and then change it up here on the Control panel or down here on the
bottom of the Tools panel. I can select that and change it as well. It has to be
selected though. If I had it not selected or deselected and change to something else,
it will not work. So I'm going to go back to the Paintbrush tool and now any new shapes I draw or
new paths I draw with the Paintbrush tool will be in this color.
Up on the top you see the Fill and Stroke so if I select that and just click and
drag, its going to get rid of the Fill because the Paintbrush tool doesn't have a
Fill. It just has the Stroke or the color of the path with the points in between.
We can click on Stroke Width up here, let's just say I change it to 16 point, click and drag
and it's a lot thicker. You can change Variable Width, you can change Styles.
For example, you got a couple of Default here and you can also click in the upper right corner,
You could open the Brush Library, There's a bunch of other ones in here as well.
So if I selected one of those, say this one and click and drag, it will add that stylized path.
You can also adjust the opacity. As far as Style up here goes, if I draw with the
Paintbrush tool and then I select a Style, it's not applying it. You can see down here.
So how would I apply it to something that's, because it's de-selected, if I just click and
drag and then selected one of the selection tools, then add a Style, then it'll add a Custom
Style for us. You notice when I draw this that these are all paths. So it has all
these paths in here even though we don't really need that if you just want the
effect to look like this and that's when we would use the Blob Brush.
So the difference between the Paintbrush tool and the Blob Brush tool. I'll show you here.
So the Blob Brush tool, if I just click and drag and,
say I'm making some kind of shape here and I go over to
the Direct Selection tool and select it, you'll notice now it's a little bit different.
Now see the difference. This has all these paths inside of it and this, the path
is actually around the edge and has a Fill. So the Blob Brush tool you just kind of
adding to the shape and then the points, the anchor points and the paths in between are on the edge.
The Stroke is on the edge there so I could actually add a Stroke after the fact and
make it larger so we can notice it here. So that's the Blob Brush tool and then just the
regular Paintbrush tool. That's the difference. You'll notice, regardless of whether you're using the
Paintbrush tool or the Blob Brush tool, whenever I draw something out, it like deselects it.
So if we want it remain selected, all we have to do is double click on the
tool here in the Tools panel and then there's a couple of options in here.
Fidelity between Accurate and Smooth. So what kind of path you want. Fill New Brush Strokes
Keep Selected, Edit Selected Paths. So if you go to Keep Selected and click OK.
Now if I just click and drag, you'll notice you got anchor points and
paths in between and it's still selected. So if I draw this down here, that's still selected.
Now what's pretty neat is we could do this if we selected it earlier but here we don't
have to do that extra step. We can just keep drawing. If I hover over the edge
here, click and drag, you'll notice it added to that so don't deselect it.
Let me turn that off, I'll show you the difference. So if I go to the Paintbrush tool, uncheck Keep
Selected and then I just draw and then I try to draw right on the edge to keep
those points connected like that.
You'll notice these are still two separate paths so we would have to put them
over each other,
select them with the white arrow like so and then go to Object, Path, Join and then it
would join them. So we don't want to have to do that. We can just go to Keep Selected and
then when we're drawing with the Paintbrush tool here, just hover over an area and you can
add to it and keep the path going from the edge like so. It's pretty useful when
you want to draw logos or illustrations. It's kind of free-form. I can use a tablet to do
some of these techniques for drawing with the Paintbrush tool but the mouse can
work as well in certain contexts. So the Blob Brush tool, if I double click it, it has
some of the same options here. It actually has more options down here compared to the
the Paintbrush tool so you can change the size here instead to make that larger and
then Keep Selected is checked up there. So now when I just click and drag, it's
still selected. So when I click and drag again, as long as I go over it a little bit, then
it adds to it. Instead of just adding a new shape, it adds to the original one and
again you can adjust these after the fact. So you can adjust the curves right
here even, and you can also adjust the anchor points. Deselect there. There you go.
And then also, the handles of those curves and also where the points and the paths are.
One more thing about the Paintbrush tool. Up here we have the Size
Earlier we were going over... 15 Point Round for example. What's pretty neat though,
what you can do is if I'm just clicking and dragging like that, you can actually
press the left or right bracket and that will actually change width even after we have
drawn it. So like in Photoshop, where you're using the Brush tool and you press the left and right
square bracket to resize the brush without having to go up to the top panel.
We can do that in Illustrator and even after we've already drawn it.
So I can press the right bracket, make it quite large and draw. I can press the left bracket,
make it a little bit smaller and so on.
So practice using the paintbrush tool and the Blob Brush tool.
You will get better at it as you go along
and I will see you in the next lesson.