- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how you,
yes you, can create your own custom art brush
that's actually going to work better than the one
we've assigned so far, and to see what I'm talking about,
I'll go ahead and zoom in to the top of the H here,
at the top right corner, and notice that certain parts
of that orange art brush, which goes by the name chalk round
as you may recall, certain parts of it look pretty good
and then certain parts of it just disappear,
as in the case of the top right corner,
and then other areas exhibit weird divots and holes,
and that's partially a function of the fact that
the chalk brush has a lot of edge detail associated with it
but we're also running up against the point
at which the H begins and ends.
Now every single path outline, whether it's open or closed,
has a beginning and ending point.
In the case of an open path,
you have a very obvious beginning point
and an obvious end point,
but in the case of a closed path,
there's just a point somewhere along the path outline
where things begin and end, and in the case of the H,
it happens to be up here.
For the other letters, its occurs in different positions,
such as this bottom right point in the C and so forth.
So what we need to do is create a custom art brush
that's going to do a better job for us.
So I'm going to go ahead and turn off the base
and big type letters for a moment,
and then I'll click on that big type layer
and I'll create a new layer, either by alt + clicking
on the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel,
that's an option + click on the Mac,
or if you loaded d.keys and you want to do it entirely
from the keyboard, you can press control + shift + alt + l,
that's command + shift + option + l on the Mac.
Either way, you'll bring up the Layer Options dialog box
and I'll go ahead and call this guy chalk alts
because these are going to be alternatives
on the existing chalk brush,
and then I'll just go ahead and change the color
to let's say violet and click OK.
All right, now you want to bring up the Brushes panel
and then notice this guy right here, Chalk - Round.
Go ahead and grab him and drag him and drop him
into the document window.
And I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on this guy.
Actually, if I had left him selected,
I could have zoomed in by pressing control + plus
or command + plus on the Mac and centered it as well.
In any event, here's my guy, and notice that he appears
inside of a transparent rectangle.
Well, here's why.
I'll go up to the View menu and choose Smart Guides
in order to turn my smart guides on, and then,
I'll just grab my line segment tool
and I'll make sure it's aligned with the beginning
and the ending of that rectangle,
so it's the entire width of the rectangle,
as we're seeing right here.
I'll go ahead and switch back to the black arrow tool,
which I can get by pressing the v key.
I'll make sure that outline is selected,
and then I'll change its line weight
up here in the control panel to one point,
and no notice if I click the word Basic
up here in the control panel and I switch to chalk round,
that I get an effect that's exactly the same size.
So that transparent rectangle helps to determine
the relative size of the brush
with respect to the path outline.
All right, I don't need that guy,
so I'll just press the backspace key or the delete key
to get rid of it, and now I'll go ahead
and click on this object to select, and you can see
on the far left side of the control panel that it's a group.
Well, it's actually more than a group.
If I twirl the layer open,
you can see that I've got this group here.
I'll twirl it open.
I've got another group inside of it,
and then if I twirl that open, there's the brush,
which is expressed as a group, by the way,
as well as that invisible rectangle.
And so I'm just going to grab these guys, click on one,
shift + click on the other, and drag 'em
outside of the top group,
and two extra groups will just go away.
And one of the things I want to show you here
is how this guy is not filled with rich black.
So notice it's selected.
If I click on the first swatch, which represents the fill,
we are not seeing black selected,
and so if you watch very closely,
it may appear in the video, you may be able to see
the black darken up, at which point,
we have the kind of black shape we're really looking for
where art brushes that you hope to colorize are concerned.
All right, in any event, I don't want this brush.
What I want is the invisible rectangle.
So I'll go ahead and select it,
and then I'll want to move it down and well as duplicate it.
So with the black arrow selected,
I'll just press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac, and as you can see,
my horizontal value is zero, my vertical value is 30 points,
at which I'll click the Copy button
to copy that path outline.
All right, now I need another path
in order to express the brush itself,
so I'll press control + c, control + f,
that's command + c, command + f,
in order to paste the copy of the shape in front of itself
and then I'll change the fill once again to black.
We do not want a stroke.
All right, now I'm going to roughen this shape up
by going up to the Effect Menu, choosing Distort & Transform
and choosing the Roughen command, and this time around,
I came up with a size value,
because this is a very small shape, of just two points,
and because this is a small shape,
I'm going to go with a small size value initially of 2%,
and I'll go ahead and turn on the Preview checkbox
so we can see what that looks like.
I really want two points so I'll select this Absolute option
right there, and that gives me a little bit of wiggle.
I want way more than that,
so I'm going to crank the Detail value as high as it goes
to 100 per inch, and then I'll change the points from corner
to smooth to produce this effect here, and I'll click OK.
All right, now if we leave things the way they are
at the spot where the beginning of the path
meets the end of the path, we don't want that,
so we need this path to be a little wider
and I'm going to make that happen by switching
to the scale tool, which of course you can get
by pressing the s key, and then you just want to drag
let's say to the left, in my case, it looks like
about 104% width-wise, and you want the height value
to stay 100%, so make sure to drag in a horizontal direction
while pressing the shift key, and just to see
how things are faring, I'll switch back
to my black arrow tool and I'll marquee these shapes
and sure enough, I've extended the path
outside of the transparent rectangle.
All right, now art brushes, as with repeating patterns,
as we'll see in the next chapter,
don't support dynamic effects.
So we need to convert this guy to a static path outline
by going up to the Object menu
and choosing the Expand Appearance command,
or if you loaded d.keys, you have that shortcut,
totally up to you, which gives us this effect here.
All right, now I'm going to make another copy of these paths
by pressing the enter key or the return key on the Mac
to bring up the Move dialog box.
You should still see those same values, in which case,
click the Copy button in order to make a copy of those paths
and then just do it again by pressing control + d
or command + d on the Mac, so that we have three sets
of these things, and the reason we're doing that
is because you never know how a brush is going to work
until you actually apply to a path outline.
All right, now I'm going to select the very first one like so
by marqueeing these two paths
and then I'll go up to the Window menu
and choose the Pathfinder command
to bring up the Pathfinder panel
and I'm going to click this guy right here,
the third icon in, which is Intersect,
which will go ahead and lop off the edges,
and I'm really just doing that to see how it's going to work.
All right, so now that we have three variations,
two of which are currently identical,
we have what we need to test out this art brush
and we're going to be doing exactly that in the next movie.