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FEBRUARY 13, 2004 Creating Custom Brushes for Illustrator, Part 2
A couple funny things about working with Art Brushes. First, the longer the stroke, the more "bristly" its appearance. This is owing to the fact that Art Brushes are stretched, rather than repeated, along a path. So, for example, here are two examples of one of my brushes, the first applied to a short path, the second to a long path. Same brush, radically different appearance.  [an error occurred while processing this directive]Also affecting the look of the brush is the size of the Stroke you set. With a custom brush, the Stroke value, by default, is set to 1 point. But you can alter this in the Stroke palette to affect the brush's overall size and apparent level of detail. A Stroke size of 0.5 points equates to reducing the size of your nib to 50 percent its original dimensions. A stroke size of 2 points doubles the original nib dimensions. And so on. Of course, you can also set the scale of the brush at the time of the brush's creation or by double-clicking it in the Brushes palette. Either way works fine. Archiving the brushes you create Finally we come to the busywork portion of the lesson. But, again, it's a fairly simple step. In order to be able to use your brushes in the future, you must save them. Unlike brushes in Photoshop, the custom brushes you create in Illustrator are not stored automatically in a general repository that can be accessed by all documents. Instead, you have to save them as a collection manually. To do this, you first draw a stroke for each individual brush you wish to create. You must apply all strokes to a path. Any that are not applied will be permanently lost. Next, you save your document that contains all of your strokes. The document is saved as a regular Illustrator file and placed in the following directory: Adobe Illustrator/Presets/Brushes. Now, if you quit and relaunch Illustrator, your new brush collection will be available for all future documents under the Window menu (Window > Brush Libraries > [name of your file].) When selected, it will open up in its own palette.  And that's it. Get painting! If you have any further questions, be sure to visit me in the Adobe Illustrator forum here. Contact the author: Dave Nagel is the editor and producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of several World Wide User Groups, including Synthetik Studio Artist, Adobe Photoshop, Apple DVD Studio Pro, Mac OS, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Corel Painter, Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; and executive producer of the Digital Media Net family of publications. You can reach him at dnagel@digitalmedianet.com. Prev 1 2 3 4 Related sites: • Creative Mac • Digital Media Designer • Digital Producer • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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