Heart Romance Valentine Wedding Brushes for Illustrator

Heart brushes - convert to Illustrator pattern brushes

The brushes palette allows a number of formats for the saved brushes: scatter, artistic and pattern brush. Most of the heart brushes are stored as scatter or artistic but you can easily convert the brush into a pattern brush by dragging the heart brush from the palette to the artboard and then back again to the brushes palette (you can find the brushes palette via the window > brushes command) and save as 'pattern'

The brushes palette by default does not have much in. The brushes palette now includes the heart pattern brush (by using the method mentioned above).

Setting pattern heart brush in Illustrator

You can further modify the heart pattern by double clicking on the heart pattern in the palette.

You can set the corners as well as the edges, you can also modify how the heart brush is fit to the design. You can also change the scale of the applied brush and the spacing (and also the colorization method).

The heart pattern set at 26% scale below. The smaller the scale, the more of the heart designs will be added to the current selected path (of course you could use any shape as the path - even the heart itself could be used as the path)

Text and heart brushes in Illustrator

The designs above have been applied to a circle (as well as some variations of a circle). The same heart brush patterns can also be applied to text as well as a brush stroke.

To apply to text you have to apply the brush via the appearance palette by adding a new stroke to the characters line in the appearance palette. Applying the patterns to text does require a bit of experimentation with the size and spacing and other settings and some patterns work well and others (not so well). T

he appearance palette can be use to add multiple strokes to text and therefore you can add multiple colorful heart (or other) patterns to the stroke. You can also apply effects to the strokes / heart patterns.

Heart Pattern brushes - changing scaling and direction in Illustrator

The heart pattern brushes can be used to create a vast range of different design simply by changing the angle of the original design (supplied) and re-saving as a new brush, along with changing the scaling for the brush

Original heart brush design in Illustrator CS5 (this pattern is from the brushes pack 43)

example - heart brush applied to a circle

example the same heart brush but this time with a scaling set via the brushes palette to 40%

example the heart brush modified and rotated by 90 degrees and then re-saved as a pattern brush in Illustrator

example - the rotated heart brush pattern but now with reduced scaling via the brush palette. Makes a quick and easy frame

Opening heart brushes in Illustrator CS5 (as well as earlier)

The heart brushes are opened via the Illustrator brush palette right side menu.

Once opened, the brushes can be accessed via the brush library

The brushes can be applied via the paintbrush tool

Re-use the heart brush - it is a vector - in Illustrator

The pattern brush can be saved over and over and in different directions (in the first example the heart pattern brush has been saved upright, the example below shows the same heart design rotated by 90 degrees and saved as a new pattern brush)

Heart brushes and Illustrator width profiles

For some weird reason you cannot use the width profile in the options / settings for the heart (or any other pattern) brush - the option is not enabled. You can, however, apply the width profile (found in the CS5 version of Illustrator) to the path and this can modify the pattern in countless ways

Heart pattern brushes and width tool in Illustrator

You can use the width profiles but for even more stunning pattern brush manipulation you can also use the width tool (found in the Illustrator tool box). The patterns can then be molded and warped to create unique pattern designs in seconds - they can also be restored just as quickly to the former settings

Heart pattern brushes - combine brushes to create complex and ornate designs

You can use the brush as a single brush dab but you can always combine the brush dabs (either the same design repeated or different designs combined) to create more ornate brush designs using the pattern brush tool

The above example combined three of the same brush dab design, a large brush dab and then two smaller dabs of the same brush. The heart brush was then saved as a pattern brush in the brushes palette and then applied to a circle path

The example above uses two circles combined in an infinity shape and then the pattern brush has been applied. A near infinite range of beautiful heart and pattern designs can be created from a basic set of shapes. The pattern brush is a powerful feature of Illustrator. Tweaking the spacing and the size and the fit setting may also be required as sometimes the pattern generated designs will overlap.

Fit settings in Illustrator

The design has been further modified by changing the fit option to add space to the fit. Experimentation will result in the 'perfect' design (perhaps!)