Illustrator Tutorial : Making your own Art brushes

Hello! Happy Friday to you!

Today, I have a fun tutorial, and a freebie for you. It's about creating your own brushes in Illustrator. The reason it is great to do this in Illustrator is the next time you pick up your pen to draw on your Wacom, you'll have some nicely textured and realistic doodles!

First, grab your favorite medium, whether it is art marker, crayon, charcoal, etc and draw some strokes on a piece of paper. Using varying widths and lengths. Try and make them a bit straighter but otherwise feel free to make them your own.

For our tutorial today, I used a black art marker, charcoal pencil and some of my Micron pens. I scanned them into my computer as a greyscale jpg and then opened them in Illustrator...

Next, with my brush scan jpg selected, I chose Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options.

You'll get a dialog box telling you the file is large and it may take a while to trace, click OK.

Next, in the Tracing Options box, select Preview and then choose a tracing preset that best fits the style of your brush strokes. I always have the best luck with Black and White Logo or Detailed Drawing. The nice thing about selecting Preview is you can go through the drop down menu and see what each preset looks like.

Then at the very top menu, you'll see a button that says "Expand". Click on that to finish your tracing.

Once your scan has been outlined and expanded we need to clean it up a bit.

At this point even though everything has been traced and is vector, it is still grouped and has a white background behind the image. First, choose Object > Ungroup

Then select the white image background behind your image and hit Delete to remove it.

One more thing to clean up. When we scan and outline we sometimes have white areas that remain in our vector images. Select a white fill area anywhere in your drawing.

Then choose Select > Same > Fill Color.

You'll see all the white areas are active. Hit Delete to remove these.

That's it - we are all cleaned up and vectorized and ready to make some Art Brushes!

Before we do, please save your Illustrator file!

Okay, the process for making Art brushes is the same for each of our strokes.

First, select your first brush stroke

Then from the Brush Palette, we want to choose New Brush

Select New Art Brush and click OK

In the Art Brush Options box, name your brush, choose the direction going to the right, and select it to flip on both axes. Lastly, from the color method, choose Tint. This is in case you want to draw in color, it will color your brush strokes.

The Proportional setting varies your brush width depending on the size of your drawing. I like to leave this unchecked and then choose the stroke width manually. But it's a matter of preference.

Repeat these steps for each of your strokes.

Then when you are done, select all the strokes in your brush palette.

And choose > Save Brush Library

Name your file and save it into your Illustrator Brush Folder

The next time you are doodling your heart out, open up your saved brushes this way.

Go to your Brush Palette and from the right arrow choose, Open Brush Library

From the extended menu, choose User Defined and there you will find your brushset!

Once your brushes are loaded into your Illustrator workspace, just select the one you want to work with and begin to draw! Feel free to change the brush stroke width as you work to get the look you want.

For this tutorial, I've included some doodles I made from my brushes for you (in .abr and .png) as well as the original strokes in Photoshop and Illustrator so you can play along and discover how to make your own Art brushes in Illustrator.

 

I'd love to see how you are creating your own brushes in Illustrator and any tips if you have them. One thing that I hate when I do create my own brushes is that any place that my strokes overlap, especially if the stroke is wider, I get a white space. If anyone knows how to fix this, let me know!

Illustrator Tutorial 1 (2.0 MB)

Have fun!
Nan

 

Comments

[christine]

great tutorial... illustrator still frightens me, but i'm trying to get it. i think this will help me delve into it.

[Amber]

love this tut Nan!! :)

[just sarah]

I have illustrator but havent had time to learn it yet so this is a great tut to have. Thanks for sharing.

[Becky]

Thanks for the tutorial! I have Illustrator but have been hesitant to jump in-this will help!

[Roben-Marie]

Thanks so much for this tutorial! I do have a question. I have doodled and scanned many things into Illustrator and tried a variety of Trace functions and strokes, etc. and they never smooth out the edges. I tried your directions for a doodle border but the edges of the lines are not smooth. Any suggestions on how other designers get the lines so smooth?

Many thanks!
RM :)

[Nancie Rowe Janitz]

RM - to smooth out edges, you can use the smoothing tool (its the one that looks like a pencil but with hash marks in it.) Just pick that tool and run it along the part you want smoothed. Do it a few times and it should work. I am also emailing you another tutorial on scanning doodles... hope it will help answer this question but if not, just holler!

On my brushes tutorial I didnt smooth out the edges because I wanted them to look rough like charcoal, kwim?

hugs!
N

[Felix]

Thank you so much! great brushes! :)