From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

Sketch with brushes - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

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Sketch with brushes

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- [Instructor] With Illustrator's native tools, you can't draw dynamic paths and use brushes at the same time. You can either use brushes with the paintbrush tool or you can draw dynamic lines with the pencil tool, but you can't draw with both dynamic lines and brushes. But with the dynamic sketch tool, you can have both. Here's how. First, take the dynamic sketch tool, and then open the brushes panel and select the brush that you want. My brushes panel here is almost empty, so I'm going to add a brush that I like from the Artistic Brush Inc. brush library. I'll choose Artistic, Artistic Inc., and I'll click on this one here, tapered stroke to add it to my brushes panel. And because I want a consistent stroke width, I'll go to the dynamic sketch panel and set the menu for varying the stroke width to none. I'll zoom in on my butterfly shape, and just start drawing. And you can see that I'm using my tapered brush, and I can reshape paths on the fly by moving my cursor near an existing path. So I see that little chain icon appear, and then clicking and dragging to draw a new line. I can draw other paths. And continue on like so. And if I want to switch to a different brush, I just go back to the brushes panel and pick one. This time I'll try something different. I'll pick one from the chalk, charcoal, pencil library. And I like this one here, charcoal thin. I'll just click it, it gets added to my brushes panel, and because these paths were already selected, the brush is applied to them too. And I'll make the stroke a bit thicker so we can see that. So in this movie, we saw how the dynamic sketch tool combines the best aspects of Illustrator's native paintbrush and pencil tools by allowing you to dynamically draw lines formatted with various brushes.

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