- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to save
each one of our wiggly path outlines as a custom art brush.
And then I'll show you how to apply those art brushes
to our text, and what to do in the event
that we run into problems, which we will.
All right, so notice that I've gone ahead
and named each one of my experiments.
So the first one is the pathfinder object.
The second one contains all the wiggly edges,
along with the transparent rectangle.
And the third one's just a copy of the second
that I can adjust later, if and when I discover problems.
All right, so I'll go ahead and select this first guy,
and then I'll bring up the brushes panel.
And now all you need to do is drag it and drop it
into the panel, like so,
but I want you to notice one other option.
Currently, we're seeing a little blue line
before that chalk brush.
Well, notice what happens if I press and hold the ALT key,
or the Option key on a Mac.
I get a thick border around that brush,
which tells me that I'm going to replace the original.
So you can replace one brush with another
by ALT or Option dragging it.
But I don't see any reason to do that,
so I'll just go ahead and drop this guy into the panel.
Now, your only option is to select scatter brush, art brush
or pattern brush, and that's because calligraphic
and bristle brushes rely entirely on numerical data.
So I'll go ahead and select art brush and click OK.
And then, you want to go ahead and name this guy,
I'll call it chalk alt 1, and then, as you can see,
you have quite a few options to choose from.
You can make your brush pressure sensitive,
if you use a tablet, in which case,
you can set your default thickness, as well as the minimum.
In my case, I just want it to be fixed.
Now notice that you can scale the brush proportionately.
We saw that that's generally not a good idea,
unless of course you're saving a dolphin as a brush.
You can scale it to fit the stroke length,
which is generally what you want to do,
or you can stretch it between two guides.
Now, if you select this option,
notice I could click in the start value, and I could press,
for example, SHIFT + Up Arrow
and then TAB over to the end value,
and press SHIFT + Down Arrow.
Actually I would have to do that twice in a row,
in the case of this specific item.
And then that's going to set my start and end guides
at 10 and 80 points, respectively,
which is going to tell Illustrator to stretch anything
between the guides, but never stretch anything
outside the guides, and that's going to be useful
anytime your brush includes ornaments
at the beginning or end, as with an arrow head, for example.
That's not what I want, however, so I'll just set this
to the middle option.
Now presumably, you want your art brush
to go in the direction of the path outline,
which is how things are set by the default,
but you could set it to move
in a perpendicular direction if you wanted to.
Probably don't.
So I'll just go ahead and select this guy, as by default.
You can choose to flip the brush along the path outline,
which is going to set it in the other direction, or across.
So again, you can play with those.
Nine times out of 10 though,
you want to leave all this stuff off.
Notice this overlap setting right here,
which is going to adjust the corners and folds
to prevent overlaps.
That's a real great setting, by the way,
so just go ahead and leave that guy on.
In fact, the only changes you need to make,
besides naming your brush, is to change
your colorization method to tints,
which is going to work better if your art brush
is RGB black, that is a rich black, as ours is.
In which case, just go ahead and click OK.
And now notice that the brush appears at the end
of the art brush list.
Now you can drag it to a different position if you want to,
but for now I'm just going to leave it where it is.
All right. Now I'll marquee these shapes.
You need to grab both the black wiggly path
and its transparent rectangle,
and then drag it and drop it into any old location,
bear inside the brushes panel.
Select art brush, click OK, go ahead and call this guy
chalk alt 2, change the colorization method to tints,
and then click OK.
And you now have two custom art brushes.
All right, now let's apply 'em to our text
by turning this layer off and turning the big type
and base layers on.
You may need to zoom out just a little bit here,
at which point I am seeing the top right corner of my H,
which is what I want.
I'll go ahead and click on the point type to select it,
and then I'll switch to the appearance panel
and I'll select the bottom stroke,
which is set to chalk round.
And then I'll scroll down my brushes list right here.
I might expand it a little bit as well.
And I'll select chalk alt 1.
And notice when it happens.
Right at that point, where we had a gap,
we still have a gap, and that tells me that is definitely
the position at which the H begins and ends.
And you can look for other problems as well.
We have a little bit of a gap there in the C.
And the other one that's obvious is over here
on the letter K, and this is the bottom right corner
of the K, by the way.
We've got a gap at this location.
We would see a gap at a bottom right corner of the R
and the bottom left corner of the I,
but they're covering each other up.
All right, so let's go ahead and return
to this region right here.
Now you might figure that one solution is
to click on the word stroke, up here in the control panel,
and change the cap to a projecting cap,
because if those are end points, that should fill things in.
But, doesn't work, and changing the corner to a round join,
or even a bevel join, isn't going to fix the problem either.
The one and only fix is to try a different art brush.
All right, so let's go ahead and try chalk alt 2.
And notice this time around,
we get a very different kind of problem
that ends up repeating itself to a small extent
right here at this point on the C.
And you're going to see some problems down here below
the intersection of the R and the I,
as well as this area of the K.
And the reason this is happening,
that we're getting these giant spikes flying off,
is because those small edge details right on either side
of this brush are getting exaggerated,
because the brush is getting stretched.
So the question becomes what in the world is the solution?
And I will divulge exactly that in the very next movie.