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Bristle Brushes

Lesson 6 from: Create Brushes in Adobe Illustrator

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

6. Bristle Brushes

Bristle brushes are the traditional painting brushes. Choose from a list of brushes and adjust size, bristle length, hardness, density and stiffness to create a result that mirrors the use of a paint brush.
Next Lesson: Pattern Brushes

Lesson Info

Bristle Brushes

On the list of amazing things that you can do with brushes, bristle brushes. Bristle brushes are definitely along the lines of a more traditional paint brush. So you can see I've applied some traditional brushes here. The default one that's in the brushes paneled called the mop brush, gives that very painterly quality to your artwork. So it's not like you're creating something here. We can go in. We can actually pick and choose from hundreds of different options, and several different brushes to create the painterly style that you like. To create a new bristle brush, brushes panel, drop down, new brush. We're gonna choose the bristle brush, and click okay. Here, we don't actually start with any artwork. We have a set of built-in brushes here. We've got five different round brushes, and five different flat brushes, and you pick and choose whatever style of brush. You pick and choose whatever style of brush you'd like to go in and edit. So round, blunt, curved and so on. So if I start ou...

t with a round fan, nice little option here, it shows you what you are doing in this brush options window. So when it comes to the size, obviously this is the size of your brush, your brush length. You can control this to be short or long brush length. Of course a very short length is going to go and create a very defined pattern. Whereas the long brush is going to give it much, much nicer of a dragging pattern here. The bristle density, very low bristle density. You're dealing with very few bristles, high bristle density. Lots of bristle. The thickness of the bristle can be very fine. So it's very thin and gives a multi bristle effect or you can do very coarse kind of aggressive where you're gonna be getting thicker, heavier bristles, and therefore it's gonna keep the ink on them. Paint opacity. So you can paint with total translucency or paint with more opaqueness. And this is interesting because you can see each and every stroke of every bristle kind of overlaps themselves. And you can see that in the picture here, you can kind of see this opacity here. So it's kind of blending these together, and you can also control how flexible or how rigid your brush is going to be. Flexibility is going to give you more of the ability to have kind of this variation in here because the brush is going to kind of flex a little bit more and display out, whereas the stiffness or the rigidity allows you to get that more rigid, and get much more linear strokes. So you can name all of these. If I name them correctly. (keyboard typing) And click, okay. So there's my round fan. Let's try that. So I'm gonna grab the brush tool, and I'm gonna paint with my round fan right there and that's what it looks like. Now, if I'd like to increase the size of this fan as well, I'm going to select what I've just painted, and then I can up the stroke weight. So I can see how this looks in terms of adjusting that size and that fan. This is nice if you want to go ahead, and you want to paint highlights, and shadows on something, you can go in and use the opacity of the brush or the brush settings here to then go in and control the density of how opaque or how transparent it is. But after you've painted, you can also take what it is that you've painted here, and additionally control the opacity of your brush artwork by controlling the opacity here. Okay. The overall opacity of this brush. So you don't have to control the ultimate opacity inside your brush here, whether it be translucent or opaque, you can also just select your artwork here. You can control opacity additionally from here, and simply select each piece of artwork that you've created, and adjust the opacity as well from that. Now this does require a lot of creation for different types of brushes to be able to go through, and create a whole pallet of bristle brushes for you to use. But the options are quite amazing. Several different types of options with all different types of bristle brushes created and just simply take your brush, and apply that to whatever you'd like to create. Now of course you can always choose any color from your swatch panel, and simply paint with that as well. One of the things you can do too, is you can also paint with a gradient. So in my stroke panel, I'm going to select my, one of my brushes that I've done, and I'm gonna apply a gradient effect to it. That could be cool. So instead of painting in a singular color, I don't have to worry about that. I can actually paint with gradients, however I'd like and that could make it quite interesting. So along those lines, then I can have a lot of fun. If I go in here and I'm painting with my brush, I can control how that works. Of course the gradient only goes the one direction. So even if I paint different directions with my brush, you'll notice that the gradient is always going the default gradient way there. Now along with the other brush options, if you are using the same brush through here, say the mop or the round fan, and you'd like to change the attributes of one of your strokes without changing your actual brush settings, you can select your brush stroke or strokes and go into your brushes drop down menu, choose options of the selected object. Change any of the attributes while you're working with this so you can see how that looks in terms of any changes or options that you apply to that brushstroke all by itself. So while not as dynamic as the other brushes, bristle brushes can definitely give you a very nice painterly quality to anything that you create in illustrator. Lots of presets. Lots of different styles that you can go and explore.

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Ratings and Reviews

Angie redpolkadot
 

Illustrator is my favorite Adobe product, and I have been using it for a while, but I still learned so much watching this webinar. And Jason's teaching style is pleasant to listen to, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

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