Curved / Tangled / Abstract / Artistic Brushes for Illustrator

 

Mixed Illustrator brushes work with: Windows 7 Vista XP + MAC OS X (All versions)(Intel/PPC) G4 G5 Adobe Illustrator CS5 CS4 CS3 CS2 CS 10 (All Creative Suites). The mixed brushes are Commercial use license, royalty-free, all by graphicxtras.com

 

Curved, tangled, abstract design brush strokes

How can I apply Illustrator brushes to text / type?

Select the type tool in Illustrator, select the font and type the required text, expand the text via the object menu expand command and then apply the brush by by clicking the required brush stroke. The effect might require some modification as what works for a large path might not work for text paths (which can be quite complex). A slightly better way to apply brush strokes to text is to use the appearance palette as you can keep the text live. To achieve this go to the Illustrator appearance palette (with the path selected) and add a new stroke to the path, you can then add the brush stroke to this). At any point with the live text selected you can change the words. This approach can be used to create effect with whole paragraphs or a page of text.

Illustrator Calligraphic Brushes

The scatter / artistic etc strokes can use different sources for the brush stroke. The calligraphic brush tool cannot (sadly) but there are still many different uses for the calligraphic tool.

 

I really love to use the calligraphic for my comics (I especially love to work in vectors for comics instead of the more traditional pencil etc artwork).

 

You can change the angle, color, roundness, diameter etc of the calligraphic brush as well as adding in variation based on pressure if using an art pad, randomness, etc

 

There are definitely not as many 'options' as the other brushes but they are definitely worth checking out. A couple of libraries come with CS5 CS4 for starters.

 

With the recent addition of the width tool in Illustrator CS5 you can modify the calligraphic brushes to even great effect either by using the width profiles or the width tool itself.

Converting Illustrator brushes scatter / artistic etc

The examples above show the artistic brushes applied as a pattern brush. How to convert a brush from one method to another ? Select the brush in the brush palette and pull (screaming) to the Illustrator artboard. Reverse the operation and return the path to the brush palette. A dialog appears: scatter, artistic, pattern etc? Select the pattern option. A number of pattern options are available. Changing the width of the brush will change the size of the circular design. A large width setting results in an abstract design bearing little resemblance to the original artistic brush stroke.

 

Top of page