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You will learn how to use a graphics tablet in Illustrator as well as how to implement custom brushes with it.
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[Deep Dive: How to Draw in Illustrator with Mat Helme]
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If you prefer to use a tablet in Illustrator,
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you have a couple of more options when it comes to using custom brushes.
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You are able to use variations of pressure, stylus wheel, tilt, bearing, and rotation.
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Pressure creates a brush that varies in angle, roundness, or diameter
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based on the pressure of the drawing stylus.
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Now this option is only available if you have a graphics tablet
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such as a Wacom Intuos4, Intuos5, or any other type of graphics tablet.
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Now the stylus wheel creates a brush that varies in diameter
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based on manipulation of the stylus wheel.
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Tilt creates a brush that varies in angle, roundness, or diameter
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based on the tilt of the drawing stylus.
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The tilt option is only available
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if you have a graphics tablet that can detect how close to vertical the pen is.
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Next we have bearing.
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Bearing creates a brush that varies in angle, roundness, or diameter
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based on the bearing of the drawing stylus.
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Rotation creates a brush that varies in, again, angle, roundness, or diameter
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based on how the drawing stylus pen tip is rotated.
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This option is most useful when used to control the angle of brushes,
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and again, not all tablets have this,
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but if they do have this option, it's great to control the angle of brushes.
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So let's go ahead and let's add a pressure variation to the calligraphic brush.
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So from the brushes panel let's select our calligraphic brush 1,
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and on size let's change fixed to pressure
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and change the size to 5,
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with a variation of 5,
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and for roundness
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bump that to 100 at fixed,
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and angle 180 at fixed, and select okay,
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and with our paintbrush tool selected
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let's go ahead and draw a path
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and you can see when I started to draw this
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I simply pressed less on the tablet in the beginning
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and then went harder at the end, and I can do just the opposite.
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So if I press all the way down
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and then lighten up,
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you get the opposite effect,
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and again, light to heavy
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and heavy to light.
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Now let's take a look atI 1 more option.
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Now let's change the roundness to tilt.
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So in the brushes panel select the calligraphic brush.
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Double click on it.
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Roundness, let's change fixed to tilt,
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and let's vary that
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between 69% and 10%,
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and let's change angle, fixed to bearing.
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Now you can see I get this different option
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depending on how the pen is positioned.
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Now right now my pen is completely vertical,
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but when I tilt it sideways we get a much fatter line.
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Kind of like if we had a marker, say a Sharpie,
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and we placed it straight up and down
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you're going to get a thinner line because it's pointed,
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but if we angle it sideways we're going to get a much fatter marker line.
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So they did a really great job when creating the custom brushes options for us
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because we're able to get that real life experience
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with the tablet with the digital application.
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Now that we understand how to create custom brushes,
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and we understand how to use the tablet a little bit,
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let's go ahead and apply this to our project.
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So let's delete the custom layers,
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and I'm going to use the blob brush outline that I created
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and then right below that we have a layer called color.
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So with 1 of the brushes that we created,
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let's select 1 of them.
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I'm going to use this bristle brush,
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and let's select a color.
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So I'm going to create a new color
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in the swatches panel.
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I'm going to switch RGB to grayscale and get a nice gray,
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and then I'm going to select my brush, which I have,
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grab the paintbrush tool, unlock my layer,
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and let's zoom in here,
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and I'm simply just going to go in and just color this.
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Now because the background is so light,
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I'm going to actually change the color.
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So let's select all of our paths from the color layer, go up to swatches,
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and I'm going to create a
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nice orange color.
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So as you can see, with the bristle brush you can really get a nice buildup of colors.
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In this example this looks kind of like a water color meets marker gouache type look.
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You can really spend a lot of time with it and tweak it as you wish for this example.
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Simply get used to the brushes and get used to creating custom brushes
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for that type of look you're trying to create.
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