- [Instructor] Alright, so we spent a movie a piece
on calligraphic and scatter brushes.
I spent several movies on art brushes.
We'll look at pattern brushes in detail in the next
chapter, when we talk about seamlessly repeating
patterns, which is why I figured I'd be remiss
if I didn't spend at least one movie on bristle brushes.
Now bristle brushes which is the fifth brush type,
are specifically designed for that person who's comfortable
with a drawing tablet and a pressure sensitive stylus.
Otherwise, they have limited use.
But let's say you're that person.
In that case, I'll go ahead and bring up brush panel,
and notice that this document does contain a few bristle
brushes down here toward the bottom.
I'm going to go ahead and create a new one by clicking on
the little page icon at the bottom of the panel,
and I'll select bristle brush, and then click OK.
So you don't have to have anything selected in advance.
Rather, you're going to be adjusting a bunch of parameters.
Now your first choice is the shape of the brush,
and the shape is represented by this little thumbnail
there.
So, in all you have 10 different shapes to choose from,
five of which are round, and five of which are flat.
So notice they overlap each other.
You've got a round point and a flat point.
Things end with the round fan and the flat fan and so forth.
Alright, so I'm going to go with this guy, round curve.
Now, regardless of what you select, it's only going to be
represented by this little graphic right here, otherwise
the options are the same.
And for the most part, they're a little bit touchy feely.
We're asked to kind of imagine what a real-world brush
would look like.
Now, the one concrete option is the size value here,
which you can take all the way up to 10 millimeters.
But you can express yourself in points if you want to.
I could enter 12 pt for example, and press the tab key,
and illustrator will automatically convert that value.
Anyway, I'm going to take this guy up to six millimeters.
Then, we have three sets of bristle options here.
Bristle length, which would be the length of the bristles
if this were a real-world brush.
Although I have to say I don't know to what extent I
really trust this feature, other than the fact that it
allows me to visualize the effect here inside this preview.
So, you're not going to see the bristles grow on the brush.
You're just going to see the effect of the brush stroke
change.
But, notice if I reduce that length value, then the
brush and the brush stroke get a little closer to
each other.
I believe that's just to demonstrate where the brush
stroke might land, if the bristles actually grew.
Then we have bristle density.
That is how packed the bristles are, how many bristles
there are in the brush.
We've got bristle thickness, which is how thick each of
the bristles are.
We have paint opacity, which is going to build up, by the way,
and I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment.
But even if you go with a low opacity value,
you're going to have a lot of different virtual paths piling
up on each other.
And notice that the brush stroke doesn't become
completely opaque until 100%.
Even at 99%, we have a little bit of translucency
going on.
In any event, I'm going to take this back to 75%.
And then you have the stiffness option, which is going
to define how stiff the bristles are.
And I want to stress, all of this is highly subjective
and theoretical.
But I will try to give you a sense for what this
looks like.
And so I'm going to go ahead and call this my test brush,
and then click OK, and you can see it appears right here
inside the brushes panel.
Alright, now I'll just go ahead and hide the panel, and I'll
switch to the paint brush tool which is definitely going to
be your best bet where this tool is concerned.
Now, I want you to watch the cursor right there.
Try to move it into the center so we have a little more
contrast.
Do you see that thing, that's demonstrating the angle
of my stylus?
So I'm now working with a pressure sensitive stylus,
and my Waacom Cintiq, which happens to be a 22" screen,
so that I can actually see this happening in real-time.
Another option that's available to you is to use the
bracket keys.
So, if I press the left bracket key, I will make my brush
smaller, as represented by that little tilt there, and if
I press the right bracket key, I will make my brush bigger.
Alright, now I'm going to paint a brush stroke here.
And I want you to remember something.
When we were inside that dialog box just a moment ago,
there were no pressure sensitive options, and that's because
bristle brushes are always pressure sensitive.
And so notice if I start pressing pretty hard here,
and I let up over time, that not only does my brush grow
less opaque, but it also grows smaller.
Now I'm not really looking for a black stroke, so I'll
just go ahead and press ctrl+z or cmd+z on the Mac to
undo that change, and I'll set the stroke to white up here
on the control panel, and then I will just go ahead and
paint once again.
And so now I'm pressing pretty hard, and now I am
releasing over time.
Alright now, this is a path outline just as surely
as any other.
If I press the v key to switch to the black arrow tool
and I select this guy, I can move it to a different
location, I can set it to a different color if I like.
I don't really want to do that but that is an option.
I'll go ahead and press ctrl+z or cmd+z on the Mac
to undo that change.
I can change the line weight.
So I can change it up here in the control panel
from one point to two point like so, and that brush stroke
will grow.
Again, not sure I really want to do that because then it
starts getting kind of clogged up.
I could apply a transformation.
For example I could grab my scale tool and click right
there to set an origin point,
and then drag in order to stretch that brush stroke
and so forth.
But I also want you to recognize that under the hood
it is many path outlines working together.
So notice what happens if I go up to the object menu
and choose expand appearance.
I end up with a group of a lot of different paths.
And I can see it's a group by the word group over here on
the left side of the control panel.
I'm going to press ctrl+shift+g or cmd+shift+g on the Mac
in order to ungroup all these path outlines.
Then I'll click off of 'em to deselect 'em.
I'll grab this guy, the one in front, and I'll drag it
to a different location so that you can see that it
is independent of the other ones now.
Notice that its opacity value is set to 7%, and so
what I've noticed in my experience of playing around
with these things, is that if one of the path outlines
is set to a certain opacity value, and it's not always
going to be 7%, it could be 11% or higher, they'll all
be that way.
So notice this guy's 7%, I'll press the back space key,
that's number one.
This guy is 7%, I'll press the back space key, that's
number two, then we've got three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, I
think there's an 18th one, working together.
I think that's it, and so to check I'll press ctrl+y
or cmd+y on the Mac, and sure enough, there's no path
outlines left.
So that one happened to be 18 paths working together.
Each one set to an opacity of 7%, but depending on your
settings you can get completely different numbers.
You might have 12 paths set to 11% opacity, or what
have you.
But you can definitely think of this as being multiple
path outlines working together.
And the reason I really want to stress this, is because
Adobe's own documentation says that if a piece of
artwork contains more than 30 bristle brush paths,
that it's very possible you'll end up with an alert
telling you that the printability of this document
might be marginalized.
And so I just want you to know the risk-to-reward factor
associated with these things.
Alright I'm going to go ahead and take this guy and
set his line weight to two points, because he needs some
thickening up.
And just to emphasize one more thing, if I select this guy,
the opacity of the entire brush stroke, is 100%.
It's just that again, under the hood, we have a bunch of
path outlines that are set to lower opacity values
working together.
And one more thing I want you to know.
If I click in a central menu here, in order to
bring up the brush panel,
and click on the library icon, Illustrator does ship
with an entire library of bristle brushes, and so you
can open it up to explore what I imagine are a handful
of professionally curated settings.
And that is my look at the potentially interesting world
of bristle brushes here inside Illustrator.