How to Make a Custom Illustrator Brush
It’s really a lot easier than you would expect. This tutorial was requested by many of my readers after I posted this Free set of 35 Abstract Illustrator Brushes. The possibilities are endless as far as brush making goes in illustrator, but I wanted to get you started in the right direction and let you take it from here. (The purpose is to tease you, so you want to try it on your own!)
It would actually be pretty hard to make this tutorial any more detailed. Making custom Illustrator brushes couldn’t be easier. However, there are a couple things you do need to know first. There are 4 types of brushes that you can create in Illustrator. (Calligraphic, Art, Scatter, and Pattern) I will be showing you how to make an Art Brush. I haven’t explored the other 3 in as much detail, but as soon as I have I will post about it. For now, I will show you how to make an art brush, and you can experiment with the other brush types in the same fashion, the only differences are settings, and how the brushes act when applied.
Make a Custom Illustrator Art Brush:
First, open a new Illustrator document and make any shape that your heart desires. You can literally make ANY shape into a brush, even a square if you feel like it. Here’s what I made. A couple of bars and some blocks scattered about. There is no need to worry about shapes at this point because once you try this a few times, you will get an idea of how the shapes will effect your brush.
Now select all of the shapes that you want to be a brush and in your Brushes palette, click on the little arrow in the upper left, and select “New Brush.”
You will get the option to choose 1 of 4 brush types. Choose “Art Brush” and click OK.
Now you should be in the Brush Options. IMPORTANT: Make sure you select “Tints” as the Colorization Method. This allows you to change the color of the brush as a stroke color. If you don’t select Tints, your brush will always be the color it is when you create it. There are lots of other settings you can play with here, including the direction of the brush stroke. Choose your settings and click OK.
You should now see your new Custom Brush in the Brushes palette.
Now create a shape to test your brush. I used a circle, like below:
Now make sure you have the stroke selected in the tools palette, and click on your Custom Brush in the Brushes palette to apply it to the circle to see what you get:
Custom Brushes are an easy way to get shapes that would have otherwise taken you hours to draw by hand. Now that you have your brush, you can start applying it whenever you want, and adjust the stroke size to get the effect/shapes you want. In the image below, all I did was use the same brush I just created, duplicated it, overlapped it, and adjusted scale, colors and stroke sizes. You can make multiple brushes in order to get way more complex, and the more you try it, the better you get. Seriously, this took about a minute with one brush (made from simple rectangles!). Imagine what you can do if you spend some time experimenting?
Related Posts:
- Easy Illustrator Trick: Oversized Stroke
- Wicked Illustrator Brush Effect
- Illustrator Brush-Making Tip: Colorization Method
- The Power (and ease) of Patterns in Illustrator
- Working with Illustrator ‘Art’ Brushes: Options and Adjustments
- Illustrator: How to Make Custom Swooshes, Swirls, and Curls
Great Tutorial! Using custom brush’s makes for an amazing tool!
I used them for my Illustrator Hair Brush.
Great job!
uhm, very nice. :D
Great Tutorial………..My brush palette is crazy full with custom brushes and I dont know where I would be with out it…..I hope others will be using this blog to the fullest extent……..this site is amazing and keeps it simple which really helps out the beginners….I just only wish it was around when I was in college………keeps up the good work
Yet another helpful tutorial from BittBox. Looking forward to the next post about the other brush styles!
thanks for listening to our requests, bittbox!
nice tutorial.
i think someone else requested this as well, but i’ll ask again: can you put up a tutorial regarding logo design?
i have some projects for school coming up for logo design and i am having a hard time with conceptualizing icons for these projects. i’ve even bought a book on logo design and i study many logos all around, but it’s a lot harder coming up with something on my own.
if it’s too much trouble for you, perhaps you can recommend some other websites (i’ve searched around a lot myself but haven’t found anything that satisfied my needs).
thanks again!
Bitt-
Another great tutorial! I’ve used Illustrator for years myself, and reading your stuff constantly makes me look at the program in a new light. For example, I’ve known how to make brushes for years, but never bothered because I didn’t know what the possibilities could be. You really have a great knack for clarity. Thanks, and keep it up!
thank you so much for ur efforts, putting up all these brilliant tutorials.
now i dont feel low nemore when mingling with my colleagues. their designs are so great, i wish i could be them too. but then i realized, we cant be the person we are not, but we can always improve ourselves to be the better version. thank you once again bittbox!
Genius….very usefullllllll,however I can’t make it the lat part. I draw the circle & I had selected stroke when I want to applay the choosen brush is getting crap. First- I can not change the color. I just wonder if somebody can describe the detalis of the last process,please.
Thank you
I currently have AI10. How do I save brushes in AI10?
Great,
Its so easy to to this, and yet create such nice shapes.
Thanks
nice work like in all your tuttorials keep the good work bittbox!!!
ok. i tried doing this in illustrator cs2 and i couldnt find the add brush button :/
@Spence
Click on the little triangle in the upper right of the brushes palette. (if your palette is docked to the top, it will be on the tab itself) Undock, and you will see what the screenshot shows.
~Bitt
[…] Posted by sharonb under Tutorial , Illustrator Bittbox has published a tutorial on How to Make a Custom Illustrator Brush. Designing your own brushes in Illustrator not only saves you time if you often have to repeat a […]
Great job i have found in your site in a few days things that really allowed me to view illustrator from another perspective. Great job, a million thanks!
How to make brush from BW Scanned image in Illustrator
Thanks you bitt this is amazing yet again
@rich
Hey man, I am a senior graphic design major. If you need some help on learning what to do I can give you some ideas and some thoughts. I am still fresh in school so i still remember alot about stuff. Also it is good to find people that you can show your ideas to before you excecute them. I will be open and honest with you. If you need help e-mail me at engle6@marshall.edu
This tutorial is very helpful, thank you very much..I will do my own brushset, and go crazy…whooooahhh
Thanks for the great info as usual!
How can you transform artwork created by brushes back into editable vectors? Meaning, after I apply a brush, if I want to edit specific points, how to do it? Thanks a lot!!
whoops, found it. object > expand appearance.
[…] image used in this post is from the site Bittbox.com - here is the post - http://www.bittbox.com/illustrator/how-to-make-a-custom-illustrator-brush/. Probably worth spending some time here as they have a pretty large readership of almost 12,000 […]
Thanks for the tutorial, it helped me loads with my homework assignment.
By the way, your site fantastic, keep up the good work