- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to revise
an art brush so it better suits the needs of your image.
In our case, of course, we have these scribbly end points
that we need to deal with.
I'll switch over to the layers panel, and
I'll once again turn off the big type in base layers
and then I'll go ahead and turn on
choc alts right there so that we can see the third one.
Then I'll go ahead and select it and zoom on in and
I need to zoom in quite far, by the way.
And now, just so I can see that invisible path outline,
I'm going to switch to the outline mode by going to
the view menu and choosing the outline command,
which as you'll recall has a keyboard shortcut of
control Y or command Y on a Mac
and then I'll press the A key to switch
to the white arrow tool and I'll go ahead and marquis these
anchor points right here in order to select them.
And now I'll press the backspace key, or the delete key on
a Mac to get rid of those extra points.
And so what I need to do is take those points and
shave them away to create a kind of lump, and
I'll do that by switching to the pen tool, which
of course, I can get by pressing the P key.
And then I'll drag out, like so, while
pressing the shift key and then I'll finish things off by
dragging back inward while pressing the shift key as well
so we get this nice smooth edge.
Alright, now let's try things on the other side which
is pretty far away by now, so I'm going to have space bar drag
several times here.
And then I'll press and
hold the control key or the command key on the Mac to
temporarily grab my last used arrow tool, which appears to
be the white arrow and I'll go ahead an marquis these
points like so and then I'll press the backspace key or
the delete key on the Mac to get rid of them, and
then I'll shift drag out from here.
And the reason I'm pressing the shift key is to
constrain the angle of my control handle to
exactly horizontal.
And now I will finish the shape by
shift dragging in like so.
Alright now let's go ahead and save this guy out
as an art brush by pressing the V key to switch back to
the black arrow tool, and I'll just partially marquis
both the wiggly path and the invisible rectangle, and
I'll just go ahead and drag and drop these guys into the
brushes panel.
I'll select art brush, click okay, go ahead
and paste in that name for choc alt three, change the
colorization method to tints, and then click okay.
Alright, I suspect we need to zoom out a little bit here,
after which point, I'll go ahead and turn this layer off and
I will turn the big type and base layers on, and
we are really still zoomed in there.
We're also looking at the document in the outline mode, so
I'll press control Y or command Y in the Mac to
switch back to the preview mode.
I'll click on the text object to select it, and
then I'll switch back to the appearance panel.
I'll select that bottom orange stroke, and
I'll select my most recently created brush, which
of course, is choc alt three,
and while that looks better, we don't have spikes anymore,
we do have a couple of big lumps.
And I suspect that these
lumps are visible over here at the intersection of the R and
the I, they are, and down here at the bottom of the K.
And that tells me that those rounded caps that
I was trying to create manually with the pen tool are,
believe it or not, too big.
Alright, so I'll just go ahead and scroll over to this area,
where I know my shapes are lurking on a different layer, and
I'll switch back to the layers panel,
turn those two layers right there off, turn the
choc alts layer on, zoom in, of course,
and this time I'm going to go ahead and press the A key to
switch to my white arrow tool.
I'll actually press control or command Y,
once again, to switch to the outline mode.
I'll click on this edge, and
I can either drag it in, like so, and I'm pressing the
shift key while I do so, or I'll go ahead and show you a
different method over here.
I could click on this segment,
so you just want to click on the curved segment and
press the right arrow key, perhaps a couple of times to
make this guy smaller, and I'm not sure if I want it to be
this small, so I'll just drag it out a
little bit while pressing the shift key, once again, then
I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool,
I'll partially marquis these shapes, I'll grab them and
drag them and drop them into the brushes panel, I'll select
art brush, click okay, call this guy choc alt four, and
change its method to tints once again.
Click okay to seal the deal,
turn off the choc alts layer, turn on
the other two layers, press control Y or command Y on
a Mac to switch back to the preview mode, click on
a text to select it, switch back to the appearance panel,
so this takes a little bit of effort.
Click on that bottom stroke right there
in order to select it, and then go ahead
and select choc alt four.
Of course, by the way, you could just
select that same item from this
pop up menu right here directly inside the appearance panel,
after which point, things look a heck of a lot better.
We still have a little bit of rounding there, but
that's okay, it's in keeping with the lumpiness of
the art brush in general.
Things are looking a lot better at
the intersection of the R and the I, down here at the bottom
as well as the bottom of the K.
And that's how you refine a custom art brush, or
any custom brush, for that matter, to better suit
the ends and the caps of a path outline or
live editable text, here inside Illustrator