- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to create
a Pattern Brush, complete with auto corners,
which is a recent development in Illustrator.
It's a CC thing that is truly awesome.
So I'm going to go ahead and turn on my zee layer right there,
and then I'll click on it to select it.
And next, I'll go up to the Window menu
and I'll choose the Brushes command
in order to bring up the Brushes panel.
Now this panel is chock full
of a ton of different kinds of brushes
that I assembled back in chapter 33.
And we're going to add yet another brush
to the bottom of the panel.
So go ahead and click on the little page icon
down here at the bottom of the Brushes panel
and select Pattern Brush and then click OK.
At which point notice that it wants to turn
the letter Z into a brush,
which is not what we want at all.
Now what's interesting about a Pattern Brush
is that it has five different pieces to it
and each of these five pieces control
a certain element of the brush.
Now the most important one is the second one,
you have to define a Side Tile.
And the Side Tile is actually
the tile that repeats through the path outline.
And so I'll go ahead and change my Side Tile
to vertical denim, like so.
And you can see that that fills things out nicely.
But if this first item right here,
which is the Outer Corner, notice that,
and Illustrator's trying to show you
what an Outer Corner is.
This would be the corner on the outside of the path,
where this would be the inner corner
on the inside of the path,
but I'm here to tell you
it is ultimately a random phenomenon,
it really depends on the path outline.
But I'm going to go ahead and change the Outer Corner to None,
just so you can see how very important corners are.
And then I'll change the Method down here,
the Colorization Method, to Tints.
And I'll go ahead and name this guy auto denim
for reasons that will become obvious in just a moment.
After which point I'll click OK.
And then I'll go ahead and apply that brush
and I want you to notice how the brush preview
here inside the Brushes panel
has six different containers inside of it.
The first container represents the outer corner,
the second two show you the side pattern,
and so that's why that thing's repeated,
then we see the inner corner,
and after that we see the start tile and the end tile,
both of which we'll visit in a future movie.
In any case, go ahead and click on that guy to apply it.
And you can see what a mess it is without any corners.
So as long as the path outline is nice and smooth
then the Pattern Brush moves along with it
very much as if it was an art brush,
but as soon as we come to a corner we lose our pattern.
And that's because currently the corner tiles are undefined.
All right, just to make this show up a little better
I'm going to click on the stroke swatch
up here in the control panel
and change it to this light shade of orange
that begins R equals 251.
And I also want to give this guy a drop shadow.
So I'll bring up the Effect menu, choose Stylize,
and then choose Drop Shadow.
And these are my settings.
I set the Mode to Multiply, the Opacity is 100%,
the Color is black, both the X and Y Offset are 2 points,
and the Blur is 0 point,
so that we'll get a nice, graphic effect.
And notice, if I turn on the Preview checkbox
that helps things stand out nicely.
After which point I'll click OK.
All right, now let's take care of these corners here
by bringing up the Brushes panel once again,
dropping down to that very last brush,
and double-clicking on it.
And I want you to notice something here.
The Preview checkbox is turned on,
but I'm afraid it doesn't really do us much good
where the various tiles are concerned.
Now you can preview the Colorization technique,
for example, if you set it to None
then your stroke will turn black.
I don't want that, so I'll switch it back to Tints.
But if I were to set the, let's say, Outer Corner Tile
to something like Auto-Centered
then we're not actually going to see
that applied to the corner.
Although I have to be honest,
I don't know if that's the outer corner or not.
Perhaps this is the outer corner.
We're not actually preview either of them.
To see, let's just go ahead and click OK,
at which point Illustrator will ask me
if I want to apply my changes to the strokes,
I do.
Notice that Leave Strokes really grabs your attention there.
So try not to click it if you don't want to.
Just go ahead and click Apply to Strokes
and notice this time that is the outer corner,
up there in the top right corner of the artwork.
All right, I'm going to double-click on this guy again
and I want you to notice that there are four different
Auto options that are available to you.
Auto-Centered, Auto-Between, Auto-Sliced, and Auto-Overlap.
Now the first two are a little bit difficult
to distinguish each other most of the time,
but the last two are pretty obvious.
And what I've done, I'll go ahead and click OK for now,
but I've put together a handful of files
to show the difference
where this specific path outline is concerned.
So this is effect of applying Auto-Centered
to each one of the corners.
Whereas if we were to apply Auto-Between
then we would get this effect here.
So as I'm saying, it has quite the subtle difference.
So again, this is Auto-Centered
and this is Auto-Between.
So in both cases these lines are fanning outward,
we just have a different distribution
of those lines inside the pattern.
Whereas if I switch to Auto-Sliced
things are quite different.
You can see that the paths
are actually overlapping each other
and that they're sliced through the center,
as apposed to being fanned.
So that's something to bear in mind.
You may find that to be helpful sometimes.
And then if you have perpendicular corners
you might want to take advantage of Auto-Overlap,
which in our case is creating a kind of waffle pattern.
So I just want you to see what each one of those looks like.
Anyway, I'm going to switch back to my artwork in progress
and I'll bring up the Brushes panel
and double-click on that brush once again.
And I'll go ahead and change the Inner Corner
to Auto-Between, let's say,
and notice that that goes ahead
and fills out this interior corner right there.
And then if I click OK and click Apply to Strokes
then I apply that setting to the bottom left corner,
which Illustrator considers to be an interior corner
for whatever reason.
Also notice that the brush preview is filling out
here inside the Brushes panel.
So in addition to those side patterns
we also have the outer corner and the inner corner.
All right, thing is I'm not
all together happy with this brush stroke.
I want it to look more like this one here.
So in other words the lines are running parallel
instead of perpendicular to the path outline.
And that's a pretty easy change to make,
so I'll just go ahead and turn the zee off for a moment
and turn on the expanded layer again.
And I'll go ahead and zoom in here
and I'll marquee this guy
and just drag him over to the right
while pressing the Shift and Alt keys,
that's Shift and Option on the Mac.
And then I'll press the R key
to switch to my Rotate Tool right there,
and I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac,
to bring up the Rotate dialog box.
I'll enter an Angle value of 90 degrees and click OK.
And then I'll press the V key in order to switch back
to my black arrow tool,
I'll Shift + click on that red square to deselect it.
I just want it to be there for the sake of contrast.
And then I'll go to the Object menu,
choose Pattern, and choose Make.
And I'll just go ahead and call this guy
horizontal denim this time around,
and I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac,
to accept that name,
and otherwise that is it.
Now all I have to do is press the Escape key
in order to create that new pattern.
And I'll zoom back out by pressing Control + 0,
or Command + 0 on the Mac.
And I'll turn that layer off
and then I'll go up to the Brushes panel
and I'll double-click on that last brush right there,
the one that's called auto denim,
and I'll change my Side Tile to horizontal denim.
And because the corners are auto corners
they're going to fill in automatically,
as you can see right there.
So it's very easy.
In the old days you had to hand design your corners,
which means that if you decide
to change your mind with the Side Tile
you would have to redesign the corner tiles as well.
Nowadays Illustrator takes care of it for you.
At which point I'll click OK
and then Illustrator will ask me
do I want to apply my changes to the strokes?
Of course I do.
And so then I'll just go ahead
and bring back my zee, like so.
And you can see that the deed is done.
The one problem is notice right there
that we've got some goofy overlapping going on,
I don't want that.
And so I'll bring back the Brushes panel,
I'll double-click on the brush,
and I'll change that Outer Corner Tile
from Auto-Sliced to Auto-Center, let's say,
and then I'll click OK to accept that change.
I'll click Apply to Strokes
and I end up with this effect instead.
Now the thing to bear in mind
with both of the auto functions
is they tend to result in a little static,
as we can see right there.
If that bothers you
you might go ahead and double-click again
and try switching that to Auto-Between
and see if that works out any better.
And in my case, eh, I don't think it really does,
so I'll press Control + Z, or Command + Z on a Mac,
to undo that change.
And then I'll hide the Brushes panel
and I'll just go ahead and press Control + 0,
or Command + 0 on a Mac, to zoom on out.
And that is how you create a Pattern Brush
that flows along the contour of a path outline,
as well as how you take advantage
of the four auto corner settings here inside Illustrator CC.