With the last post I wrote, I’m sure some of you were wondering what I meant by making a custom brush in Illustrator. Custom brushes are one of the most useful tools in Illustrator. They can allow you to quickly create some great effects that would otherwise take you hours to recreate manually. They’re also reusable. You could spend an hour tinkering with a brush shape to get it perfect, but once you’ve created it you can use it over and over again.

Before I start you should know that some of these steps can be skipped if you’re just making a quick, disposable brush that you don’t plan on using again. I always think it’s best to go the extra mile and make everything you do so that it can be reused. You never know when something you’ve done before will save you hours of work in the future.

First, you want to create a new document and make sure your “Brushes” palette is visible. To make sure your custom brush palette is uncluttered with stock brushes go ahead and deselect the view for all brushes except “Art Brushes”. Then whatever is left just select and press delete, or the trash can. It will say the brushes are in use, but they aren’t and continue with the deletion. They won’t be deleted permanently so don’t worry.

Next, you can design your brush. Brush shapes can be anything from simple thick-to-thin styles or abstract styles. One way I make my thick-to-thin brushes is using the ellipse tool and make a really long, thin oval. Then you can mess with the nodes in the middle to adjust how thick you want the thickest point to be. You can even mess with the end points to make them pointier if you’d like.

It can be fun to experiment with new shapes just to see what will happen when you put them on a stroke.

One thing to keep in mind when you’re designing a brush is that with tight curves or sharp corners the shapes can become distorted. This will even happen with simple brushes at really small sizes. You also have to decide if you want the ends of your brush to connect seamlessly. It can be done, but without doing further work they won’t look right when used with sharp corners or squares. You can use the “scissors” or “cut” tool on the corner nodes, but depending on the brush shape this may not help. I use this method frequently when using the thick-to-thin brushes because it gives it the kind of hand drawn look you’d see if you were drawing corners with a brush and ink.

When you’ve got the design down and have it selected you can either drag the shape into the Brushes palette or you can click on the Brushes submenu and press “New Brush”. Make sure you select “New Art Brush”.

I haven’t used it much, but this is where you could make a brush with corners. You would select “Pattern Brush”. Then you would supply the ends, middle, and corners for your pattern. This is what you’d use if you were making a border pattern. I guess I may have to experiment with it and do a future post on it. Seems like it could be cool.

This next window could seem overwhelming, but it’s not so bad. Choose a new name for the brush if you want, but you really don’t have to. You probably won’t mess with the direction of the brush unless you’ve got a definitive start and stop to the brush. For example if you have a flat edge that goes down to a point. I usually check “proportional” under size. This will increase the size of the brush based on the length of the line. After you’ve made your line, if the brush isn’t the thickness or size you want you can just change the stroke size. I do this often so I can add a little more variation into my lines. The last thing is Colorization. If you’d like to color your strokes with your color palette choose “Tint”. Personally this doesn’t matter because I always expand my lines which turns them into shapes anyways.

Now you’ve got your brush in the palette. Try it out by making a shape with just a stroke or using the pen tool. Select your stroke and then select the brush you want to use. Boom….Done. At this point, you can make it bigger or smaller by changing the stroke or you can alter the shape by “Expanding Appearance” and using the Direct Select Tool.

After all this work make sure you “Save Brush Library” before you move on. If you save it in the Illustrator application’s brush presets folder you can import your brushes easily. I’m not sure what it is on a PC, but on a Mac you can find the folder in your home folder in Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator/Brushes/. You can also put it in the main Illustrator application folder in Presets/Brushes/.

Have fun…it’s time for a beer.