[Deep Dive: How to Draw in Illustrator with Mat Helme]

If you prefer to use a tablet in Illustrator,

you have a couple of more options when it comes to using custom brushes.

You are able to use variations of pressure, stylus wheel, tilt, bearing, and rotation.

Pressure creates a brush that varies in angle, roundness, or diameter

based on the pressure of the drawing stylus.

Now this option is only available if you have a graphics tablet

such as a Wacom Intuos4, Intuos5, or any other type of graphics tablet.

Now the stylus wheel creates a brush that varies in diameter

based on manipulation of the stylus wheel.

Tilt creates a brush that varies in angle, roundness, or diameter

based on the tilt of the drawing stylus.

The tilt option is only available

if you have a graphics tablet that can detect how close to vertical the pen is.

Next we have bearing.

Bearing creates a brush that varies in angle, roundness, or diameter

based on the bearing of the drawing stylus.

Rotation creates a brush that varies in, again, angle, roundness, or diameter

based on how the drawing stylus pen tip is rotated.

This option is most useful when used to control the angle of brushes,

and again, not all tablets have this,

but if they do have this option, it's great to control the angle of brushes.

So let's go ahead and let's add a pressure variation to the calligraphic brush.

So from the brushes panel let's select our calligraphic brush 1,

and on size let's change fixed to pressure

and change the size to 5,

with a variation of 5,

and for roundness

bump that to 100 at fixed,

and angle 180 at fixed, and select okay,

and with our paintbrush tool selected

let's go ahead and draw a path

and you can see when I started to draw this

I simply pressed less on the tablet in the beginning

and then went harder at the end, and I can do just the opposite.

So if I press all the way down

and then lighten up,

you get the opposite effect,

and again, light to heavy

and heavy to light.

Now let's take a look atI 1 more option.

Now let's change the roundness to tilt.

So in the brushes panel select the calligraphic brush.

Double click on it.

Roundness, let's change fixed to tilt,

and let's vary that

between 69% and 10%,

and let's change angle, fixed to bearing.

Now you can see I get this different option

depending on how the pen is positioned.

Now right now my pen is completely vertical,

but when I tilt it sideways we get a much fatter line.

Kind of like if we had a marker, say a Sharpie,

and we placed it straight up and down

you're going to get a thinner line because it's pointed,

but if we angle it sideways we're going to get a much fatter marker line.

So they did a really great job when creating the custom brushes options for us

because we're able to get that real life experience

with the tablet with the digital application.

Now that we understand how to create custom brushes,

and we understand how to use the tablet a little bit,

let's go ahead and apply this to our project.

So let's delete the custom layers,

and I'm going to use the blob brush outline that I created

and then right below that we have a layer called color.

So with 1 of the brushes that we created,

let's select 1 of them.

I'm going to use this bristle brush,

and let's select a color.

So I'm going to create a new color

in the swatches panel.

I'm going to switch RGB to grayscale and get a nice gray,

and then I'm going to select my brush, which I have,

grab the paintbrush tool, unlock my layer,

and let's zoom in here,

and I'm simply just going to go in and just color this.

Now because the background is so light,

I'm going to actually change the color.

So let's select all of our paths from the color layer, go up to swatches,

and I'm going to create a

nice orange color.

So as you can see, with the bristle brush you can really get a nice buildup of colors.

In this example this looks kind of like a water color meets marker gouache type look.

You can really spend a lot of time with it and tweak it as you wish for this example.

Simply get used to the brushes and get used to creating custom brushes

for that type of look you're trying to create.