From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

956 Ilustrator on the iPad: The Blob Brush

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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956 Ilustrator on the iPad: The Blob Brush

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- [Instructor] All right now, we'll take a look at the blob brush inside Illustrator for the iPad which is an extremely expressive tool, especially when combined with an Apple pencil. And the reason is that unlike the pencil tool, which we saw in the previous movie, the blob brush allows you to draw pressure sensitive brush strokes. And so the first thing I'll do is tap and hold on the pencil tool, the fourth tool down, to bring up this fly out menu and then I'll select the second tool, which is the blob brush. And notice that it allows you to select from a few different types of brushes. I'm just going to stick with basic round. And now I'll go ahead and tap on that eight down here at the bottom of the toolbox and I'll increase this brush size value to let's say 20 pixels. Next, I'll tap on this wiggly icon directly below in order to bring up the smoothness slider and I'll crank it up to eight. And then I'll tap on this little settings icon down here at the bottom of the toolbox. Now you can mess around with the roundness and angle values if you want to. But the one I want to show off here is pressure dynamics. If you crank the size value down to 0 percent, you will not see any pressure sensitivity. So let me show you what that looks like. If I go ahead and draw a wiggly path outline like so, it may look like something we would have drawn with the pencil tool because after all it's quite uniform, but if I were to switch to the direct selection tool right below the black arrow tool and click inside the black brush stroke you can see that I actually have a closed path outline, not an open one, that is by default filled with black. All right, so I'm going to undo that brush stroke and I want to show you the difference if I switch back to the blob brush and I click on that little settings icon down there at the bottom of the toolbox, and I crank the size value up to a hundred percent and now I'll brush very lightly at the beginning of my brush stroke. And then I'll bear down like so, and now it's light again and now it's heavy again and now it's light and you can see that we have a fairly wild amount of pressure sensitivity, which is not something you can achieve as things stand now using the pencil tool. All right, I'll go ahead and undo that brush stroke and let's try something different. I'll tap on that settings icon down there at the bottom once again, and then I'll click inside the size value and I'll go ahead and dial in a value of 60 percent is going to work out nicely. And now let's see if I can actually draw something like this kid with some hair, let's say, go ahead and draw the front of his head along with an ear and down around his jaw. And then I'll just go ahead and give them a big smile like so and you can draw it with your fingertip if you want to, in which case you'll get some very smooth results, however, you will not get any pressure sensitivity because after all your finger does not provide any pressure sensitive information. All right, I'll go ahead and give this guy a nose and maybe a little bit of definition in the ears like so. That inner ear is too thick so I'm going to undo it and I'll try brushing very lightly like so. All right, now if you switch back to the direct selection tool just so you can see the anchor points and tap in some area of black, you'll see that every brushstroke that overlapped another one fused into a single path outline, and that's going to be true for this eye, along with this nose, as well as the mouth. And now I'll just go ahead and tap off the artwork to de-select it. And now if you want to fill in this face, then just go ahead and click on this black circle, which represents the fill, and I'll move this hue circle right here into this yellow region and I'll go ahead and drag inside the square as well so that I have a nice bright yellow like so. Just go ahead and paint inside the face. The problem is I don't have the right tool selected and so I'll switch to the blob brush and now I'll paint in the face like so and even though it looks like I'm painting fairly sloppily over the path outlines, well, that's actually true. I am doing that. And so I'm going to continue to paint this in like so and I'll just go ahead and paint up and over. And, you know, I think I'm going to get more work done more quickly if I increase the size of my brush, but for now I'm just going to trace around the perimeter of the face. This is going to work out, I swear to you, and then I'll go ahead and paint over in this region as well. And if you find that you have any holes, like I do right here over by the ear, then what you want to do is tap on that 20 in order to increase the size of the brush. And I'll go ahead and take it up to about 40, let's say, 41 is just fine, and I'll paint some more and what's going to happen is all these yellow brush strokes are going to fuse together. I am definitely painting outside the lines but I'd rather make this point clear to you as opposed to create a fastidiously careful piece of artwork. And so now what I'll do is switch back to the black arrow tool, I'll click on that big path outline to select it and then notice this guy right here which affects the stacking order, I'll go ahead and tap on that guy to bring up this slider bar. And I'll go ahead and drag this guy all the way over to the left-hand side here in order to move that path to the back. Now, if that little bit of yellow right over here above the left-hand ear, if that bothers you, then you can experiment with the eraser tool which is located directly below the blob brush. And notice with that path outline selected, you can go ahead and erase into it like so. It's going to look like you're erasing into the black brush stroke as well but as soon as you release, all but the selected brush stroke will be restored. And now switch back to the black arrow tool and click off that path outline to de-select it. And those are a few ways to work with the blob brush in tandem with the eraser tool in order to create expressive pressure sensitive artwork here inside Illustrator on the iPad.

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