- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you
how to apply and modify a calligraphic brush.
And we'll also be applying
that brush to live, editable text.
Okay, so as you can see, I've reverted
this file to its save state, and so,
I'm going to start things off by selecting
this point text with my black arrow tool.
And then, I'll bring up the brushes panel,
and I'll just go ahead and assign
that 30 point pressure brush.
And notice that nothing happens,
and that's because where text is concerned
you have to give the brush something
to lock onto, and here's how that works.
Step one is to go up to the Window menu
and choose the Appearance command
in order to bring up the Appearance panel.
Notice that we're seeing the main Type container,
along with the characters that it contains.
I'm going to go ahead and double click
on the characters, and notice that selects the type
at which point we can see that it has
no stroke, but it does have a fill.
Now no matter what I do to this stroke,
I'm not going to be able to apply a brush to it.
So I'm just going to get rid of this fill for now
by selecting it and clicking on the trash icon
in the bottom-right corner of the panel
just so that we're starting fresh.
All right, now I'll go ahead and click
on Type No Appearance in order to select the Type container.
And then I'll drop down to the Add Stroke icon
in the bottom-left corner of the Appearance panel,
or you have that keyboard shortcut
of Control + Alt + forward slash.
That's Command + Option + forward slash on a Mac
at which point we end up with a very thin black stroke.
All right, now that I've created that stroke,
I can assign any brush to it.
And so for the sake of demonstration,
I'm going to apply this one called three point oval,
which we know because it's up here
at the top of the panel, is a calligraphic brush.
All right, now I'm going to change
the color from black to white
at which point we see that this brush is pretty darn thin.
Now, there's a couple of different ways
of modifying a calligraphic brush.
One is to double click on it's icon
up here at the top of the Brushes panel.
And that will not only potentially modify
the way the brush is assigned to the selected text,
but it'll change the core brush definition as well.
What if you just want to change the way the brush is defined
without changing its original definition?
Then you would drop down to this dialogue box icon
at the bottom of the Brushes panel.
And you may note that I've made my panel pretty tall
because we've got a lot of brushes to look at.
And so I'll go ahead and click on that item,
which is going to bring up the Stroke Options dialogue box.
Now you can change the angle of the brush
just by dragging this little arrow icon,
and you can change whether it's elliptical or circular
by dragging on the side handles,
but I'm going to make my changes numerically.
Now, if you want to see what's happening,
make sure to turn on the preview checkbox,
and I'm going to start with the size value.
I'm going to take it up to 10 points,
and I'm going to allow it to vary by switching it to random.
Now if you had a pressure sensitive stylus,
and you're drawing with the paintbrush tool,
as I was in the previous movie,
then you could link size to pressure
or you could link angle to tilt.
That is the angle of the pen against the tablet.
But that's not going to do us any good
where text is concerned because there is no pressure data.
So I'm just going to switch it to random,
and then I'm going to take
the variation value up to 10 points.
So your variation, where size is concerned,
can be as big as the size value,
but if I were to nudge that value down,
then the variation value would go down as well
because the brush can't be thinner
than seven minus seven that is to say zero points.
In any event, I'll take it back up
to 10, and you can see that preview
out here in the document window.
Next I'm going to take the roundness value
down to 25 percent; it's also set to random, notice that.
Again, the variation value this time
can't be any higher than the roundness value.
So I'll just go ahead and take it up to 25 percent as well.
I decided to set the angle to negative 30, by the way,
and then I went ahead and chose random once again.
This time you can crank the value up much higher;
in fact, you can go as high as 180 degrees
no matter what the primary angle value is.
In my case, however, I'll just take it up to 90.
All right, now if I wanted to change
the way this brush is assigned to this object,
then I could go ahead and click OK,
but I want to show you another way to work.
So I'm just going to go ahead and cancel out here,
and as opposed to editing the original definition
of this particular calligraphic brush,
I'm going to create a copy of it by going
up to the flyout menu icon in the top-right corner
of the panel and choosing Duplicate Brush.
And that will give me this guy right there.
And then I'll double click on it
in order to bring up pretty much the same options
we saw before, with the exception
of this first guy right here, Name.
And it's probably a good idea
to go ahead and rename this brush.
And so I'll call mine 10 point Random,
and I'll change all these guys to random right here,
so I can fly through these values.
I'll go ahead and select the angle value,
and set it to negative 30, then I'll tab
over to variations, set it to 90 degrees.
Tab my way to roundness, set it to 25 percent,
same for the variation value; and then,
I'll tab my way down to the size value, change it to 10
and change the variation value to 10 as well.
Now one of the things you may notice,
if you look in the document window,
is it doesn't really seem to be any random variation.
In fact, we are seeing a uniform stroke
over the course of the entire text object.
And so the way this randomness is going to work is
that it's going to change every time
Illustrator assigns this particular brush,
but when that change occurs it is going to be uniform.
And I'll show you what I mean by first clicking OK,
at which point Illustrator is going to ask me,
"Hey, in addition to changing the definition
"of the brush, do you want to go ahead
"and apply these changes to the existing strokes?"
Now it really doesn't matter how you respond
in our case, so I'll just click Leave Strokes
in order to restore my very thin originals,
so that I can demonstrate how things are going
to change every time I click this brush.
So notice this time around, we get a random variation,
albeit one that is applied uniformly
across all of the character outlines.
And so you can just keep clicking
until you get something you like.
After which point, I'm going to go ahead
and hide my Brushes panel, and then I'll click
on the very first swatch on the left side
of the control panel in order to bring up my color swatches,
and I'll set the fill to this default shade
of orange just so that we have a color
that nicely complements the background.
And that's how you apply a calligraphic brush
to any existing path outline including
none other than live, editable text.