Custom Vector Brushes in Adobe Illustrator
I am often asked how I make the custom brushes for Adobe Illustrator that I sell on my store. The process isn’t really difficult or secretive; it’s actually quite simple. It does, however, take a little practice, some finagling, and some good assets to begin with. So let’s make a custom texture brush together!
Step 1: Find your texture
You can get these anywhere. I have been filing away .bmp textures from various photos, drawings and sources for a long time, so my library has a lot of gems to work with. I also like to draw with a pencil on various surfaces and then scan them to create gritty textures to work with. The more analog and organic the method the better.
Step 2: Live Trace that stuff
Illustrator’s Live Trace is a mighty clunky tool, but for this application it is, dare I say, perfect. I like to isolate parts of my scans in Photoshop and then paste them into a fresh Illustrator document. Then I grab that selection, click Live Trace, and let the magic begin. Different settings work best for different styles of texture, but I mostly use the “Lettering” preset and then mess with the Min. Area settings a bit. Get your texture set and then Expand!
At this point I click somewhere into the brush with the Direct Selection tool, then do a Select > Same > Fill Color, Cut the selection to remove it from the art board, Delete all the remaining straggler shapes that were negative space, and then Paste the brush vectors back into place.
After all that you should have a nice, clean texture made up of only the positive space in your original artwork. You could keep this around if you want and hand-repeat it for super-custom applications, but I like to take it one step further and make this into a brush that I can wield more easily to save time.
Step 3: Make your brush
Once you have your vectors ready you can make your new brush! Simply select the shapes you want to make up your brush and head over to the Brushes Palette. Click the menu in the top right corner and select New Brush. A dialog box will pop up allowing you to select what type of brush you want; choose Scatter Brush. This will then take you to a settings screen where you can change the way your brush reacts as you use it and set colorization properties. You can play with different settings to fit your assets, but most of mine end up looking something like this…
Just click OK and there you have it, a new vector brush ready for you to use on anything that needs a little (or a lot) of grungy texture.
If you want to see some of the brushes in action to get a better feel for them, I made some available for FREE. Download the set!
Next up, some tips and tricks on how to use them. Happy brushing!
