- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll take our first swing
at applying and modifying art brushes inside illustrator.
And I'll make no bones about it,
art brushes are, by far, my favorite.
In my opinion, they do the best job
of combining flexibility along with reliability.
And you can get some really fun, predictable results.
So I'm going to start things off by clicking on this point text
with the black arrow tool.
And then I'll go over here to the Appearance panel
and click on that orange fill.
And then I'll drop down to the Add New Stroke icon,
in the bottom right corner of the Appearance panel.
Or, again, you have that keyboard shortcut
of Control, Alt, Slash, here on the PC.
Or, Command, Options, Slash, on the Mac.
Alright, now, so far this is just your plane, old,
everyday, average stroke.
I want you to notice that it has a line weight value
to show you that it's altogether uniform.
Next, I'll bring up my Brushes panel.
And I'll drop down to this guy right here,
hand drawn brush vector pack 02.
Although, of course, you can assign any brush you'd like.
Now this is an art brush.
Meaning that the brush is getting stretched around
the outline of each and every character of type.
Now notice, over here in the Appearance panel,
that instead of seeing a line weight value,
we see the brush itself.
And if you were to click it,
you would bring up a little mini-panel of brushes,
so that you can quickly and easily change your mind.
Alright, now I want these white strokes
to be set against a larger orange background.
So I'll once again click on the fill
and add yet another new stroke.
And this time I'm going to change the color of the stroke
to that same shade of orange that I'm using for the fill.
And, then, I'll go ahead and select a different brush.
And it could be something truly wacky
like this guy right here,
hand drawn brush vector pack 03.
In which case, we'll get this radical effect.
And what I just love about being able to apply art brushes
so quick and easily to display type,
is that you can take a font like Myriad Pro,
that everybody uses all the time,
and you can turn it into something quite unique.
Alright, but I don't really want that much craziness.
So I'm going to go ahead and switch to this guy right here,
Chalk - Round.
Which will give us this fairly muted effect.
Now the problem with it, is that it's not thick enough.
And so there's a few ways
to adjust the thickness of an art brush.
One is to double click in the actual brush definition,
here inside the Brushes panel.
Which is going to bring up a huge dialogue box of options.
And it's going to change the behavior
of this brush in the future.
Or you can just go ahead and drop down
to this little dialogue box,
at the bottom of the Brushes panel,
and click on it.
And, that way, you can just make some local adjustments.
Make sure you turn on the Preview checkbox
so you can see what you're doing.
And then crank up this percentage value right here.
So if I wanted to make this brush twice as thick as usual,
I would take this value up to 200 percent.
Now, notice that that's just going to effect
the width of the stroke.
If you want to effect the brush proportionally,
that is, you don't want to stretch it,
you want to scale its height and width,
relative to the path outline,
then you turn on this Proportional checkbox.
Now, in our case, that's not even remotely what we want.
And I'd have to take the value down
to well less than a 100 percent
in order to get anything that looks nice.
Now the one time you might use this checkbox
is if you're working with a representational piece of art.
So, imagine that your brush looked like a dolphin.
Because you can have multicolor art brushes if you want.
In which case, you can use the path outline
in order to wiggle the dolphin around.
Presumably, you wouldn't want to stretch it, however.
So, in that case, you would turn on Proportional.
But for your standard, everyday, average brushes,
that's not at all what you want.
Here's another way to work, and a much easier way.
I'll go ahead and cancel out of here.
You can just go ahead and change the line weight.
Now if the line weight is set to one point,
then the brush will be a 100 percent thick.
If you change it to two points,
it'll be 200 percentness thick.
If you change it to one point 1.6,
that's the same as 160 percent and so on.
In my case, I'm just going to take it up
to two points, like so.
At which point, I want you to notice
that we've got a problem here.
Notice that the art brush and the fill do not match.
And that's because, if you take a close look at this brush,
here inside the Brushes panel,
you'll see that it's not a 100 percent black.
It's a weak black that's designed for a CMYK document
and it's set to a 100 percent black and nothing more.
Fortunately, we can fix this problem
by, once again, clicking on this dialogue box icon
at the bottom of the Brushes panel.
And, then, notice Colorization Method right there.
If you want to learn more about it,
and, in my opinion, be more confused,
then you can click on this little Tips icon there.
Or you can just listen to my advice.
If you set it to None,
then you're not going to colorize the brush at all.
At which point, I think you can see
that this is a weak black.
If you want the color to exclusively brighten,
which would work great for an RGB black,
then you set it to Tints.
But for a CMYK black, that's going to lighten things up.
If you want it to lighten and darken,
then you go with Tints and Shades.
And, for what it's worth, Adobe almost always
uses the term Tints for lightening and Shades for darkening.
In which case, we're going to get this effect right here,
which, obviously, is not what we want.
And so to clear things up, what we want is Hue Shift.
Which is just going to shift the hue
without brightening or darkening,
at least where a black brush is concerned.
And, so, having solved the problem,
I'll go ahead and click OK.
Alright, now I want to add a little bit of excitement
to the Calligraphic Brush.
And one way to do that, obviously,
would be to select it and change it to an art brush instead.
So I could select Charcoal, for example,
and get yet another interesting effect.
That's not what I want though.
What I want to do, instead, is wiggle the stroke.
And I'm going to do that by applying a dynamic effect.
So, with that Calligraphic Brush selected,
I'll go ahead and hide the Brushes panel,
just so that we have a better idea
of what's going on onscreen.
And then I'll go to the Effect menu,
choose Distort & Transform, and choose Roughen.
And, now, I'm going to go ahead
and change the Size value to three.
But I don't want three percent, I want three points.
So I'll select the Absolute radio button here.
And I'll turn on the Preview checkbox,
so you can actually see what's going on.
Then I'll take this Detail value
down to eight wiggles per inch.
And I'll change the Points from Corner to Smooth,
in order to smooth things out ever so slightly.
And then I'll click OK, in order to accept that change.
And that, friends, is our first look
at the wonderful world of art brushes
here inside Illustrator.