Illustration Toolbox

This tutorial will demonstrate the process of creating a set of brushes that you can use with your pressure sensitive tablet to ink your scanned sketches in Adobe Illustrator.

Tutorial Details

• Application(s): Adobe Illustrator
• Version: CS4
• Difficulty: Beginner
• Time: 0.5 hours

Preparation

Before using a tablet for the first time or just to make sure you have things set up for this tutorial, you may want to check your Preferences or Control Panel settings for your tablet. In this case I'll demonstrate how I like to set up my Wacom tablet pen preferences. I tend to use a lighter touch while illustrating as I find that this allows for greater control and more fluid brush strokes.

So if you're inclined to follow my lead for this tutorial, go ahead and set up your pen preferences to something similar to what's shown below.

Step 1

Open a new document in Illustrator and then open the Brush Window if it's not already open. Select the first brush preset and then Shift-click the last brush to select all of the default brushes. Delete all of the brushes using the Trashcan Icon (figure 01a), don't worry they'll be there again the next time you open a new document. After deleting all of the existing brushes, click the New Brush icon (figure 01b) located to the left of the Trashcan Icon to bring up the New Brush dialogue (figure 01c). Select New Calligraphic Brush and click OK.

Step 2

We're going to set up 26 brushes total grouped into five sets. While in the Calligraphic Brush Options window set up your first brush as shown in figure 02. Name this brush “A: 1pt Round Fixed” and click OK. Note that the name in the options starts with “A:”, this is key to setting up the brush groups as Illustrator orders brushes alphabetically when saved to a brush file.

Step 3

Create five more new brushes as shown below paying close attention to the naming convention.

Step 4

Next create four more brushes for each set. Keep the settings exactly the same for each of the sets while increasing both the Diameter and Variation values to 3pt, 5pt ,7pt and 9pt for each consecutive brush in the same set. Be sure to also change the name of each brush to correspond to the point size of the brush while following the naming convention set up in Step 3.

When finished, you should have five sets of brushes as shown in figure 04.

Step 5

To save the brushes, select all of the brushes as before in Step 1. Next, click the Brush Libraries Menu (figure 05) and name the set “Inking Brushes.ai.”

Step 6

To open the brush set, click on the Brush Libraries Menu again (figure 06a) and select User Defined > Inking Brushes. This will bring up a new window with the brush set. In order to keep this window open each time Illustrator is started, click the Options icon in the top left portion of the window and select Persistent (figure 06b). You can also make the choice here between Thumbnail View or List View as shown in figure 06c. I prefer Thumbnail View so I can select brushes more quickly. This is why the brushes were named as outlined in Steps 2 - 4 so that the types of brushes would be grouped together in order of increasing point size.

Conclusion

As demonstrated below, taking the same strokes and applying the five different brush types at 5pt, you get a very different look for each one. Now that you know how to create your own inking brushes, play around with the settings and see what you come up with.

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