Expressing Text as an Art Brush
Adobe characterizes art brushes and the other brush styles as paint-
ing tools. I prefer to think of them as a means of distorting artwork
to fi t a path. And if that’s not enough, you can bring to bear pres-
sure and width information, which are options elsewhere unavail-
able inside Illustrator (not to mention, ones that I very much envy
when working in Photoshop and other graphics programs).
Once you begin thinking of brushes as distor-
tion tools, it frees you from imagining a brush
to be simply a brush. Granted, an art brush can
resemble a traditional brushstroke. As illustrated
in Figure 9-33, however, it may also be a crude
scribble, an ornate arrow, a woodcut banner, the
silhouette of an aquatic mammal, or a consistently
spaced and regularly oriented passage of type.
An art brush is actually a graphic—that is, any-
thing you can draw—traced along a path. The
trick is to start with a graphic rendered along a
linear horizon. (For example, I drew the origi-
nal humpback whale from Figure 9-33 with its
mouth and tail along a more or less even keel, as
in Figure 9-34.) When expressed as an art brush,
the graphic blossoms into a living, squirming,
breathing element of your design. The path is
the vertebra, the brush is the vertebrate. Or put
more simply: The brush exes along the paths
in nitely fl exible spine.
In this exercise, we’ll experiment with one of the
most powerful kinds of art brush: a line of type
(the fi nal example in Figure 9-33) or what I term
the “text brush.We’ll see many incarnations of
text brushes, learn how to exploit the Hue Shift
option’s Key Color setting, and even compare the
text brush to Illustrator’s type-along-a-path fea-
ture (see the sidebar “Path Type versus the Text
Brush” on page 300).
1. Open a document with editable type. Open the le
Brush type.ai found in the Lesson 09 folder. (If you
get a font warning, click whatever button you have to
open the le.) The document features three repetitions of the
words Brush Type, the rst of which is a line of live type. The
Figure 9-33 .
Figure 9-34 .
291
Expressing Text as an Art Brush
two lower examples represent steps in the process of
creating the text brush. Ive left a blank space for you
to work, labeled as such in Figure 9-35.
2. Duplicate the top line of type. With the black arrow
tool, click the rst occurrence of the words Brush Type
to select them. Then press the Enter or Return key to
display the Move dialog box. Set the Horizontal value
to 0 point, the Vertical value to 111 points, and click
the Copy button. Illustrator adds a new line of type
that exactly fi lls in the gap.
3. Convert the type to path outlines. The Brushes panel
cant accommodate editable type. So convert the type
to static path outlines by choosing TypeCreate Out-
lines or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+O (-Shift-O). Happily,
Illustrator retains the black drop shadow effect. Press
Ctrl+Shift+A (-Shift-A) to deselect the paths.
4.
Extract an original of the Macworld Brush. Open
the Brushes panel by choosing WindowBrushes or
pressing the F5 key. Then do the following:
Hover your cursor over the gray brush above the
ones that read Brush Type and Circus Arts. You
should see a hint that reads Macworld Brush, in
deference to the fact that I fi rst created this brush
a few eons ago for Macworld magazine.
Drag the Macworld Brush from the panel and drop
it between the words Brush and Type in the new
line of outlined type.
Avoid dropping the brush onto a letter, or Illustrator
will stroke the letter with the brush. If all goes right,
you should see a small brush between the words, as
in Figure 9-36.
5.
Remove the brush from its group. The extracted brush
is part of a group that includes a bounding rectangle,
one of Illustrators closely held conventions. We dont
BRUSH TYPE
BRUSH TYPE
Figure 9-35 .
Figure 9-36 .
This spot reserved for you
292
Lesson 9: Brushes and Symbols

Get Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.