Illustrator

Create or modify brushes

You can create new calligraphic, scatter, art, and pattern brushes based on your own settings. For scatter, art, and pattern brushes, you must first create the artwork you want to use. Follow these guidelines when creating artwork for brushes:

  • The artwork cannot contain gradients, blends, other brush strokes, mesh objects, bitmap images, graphs, placed files, or masks.

  • For art and pattern brushes, the artwork cannot contain type. To achieve a brush-stroke effect with type, create an outline of the type and then create a brush with the outline.

  • For pattern brushes, create up to five pattern tiles (depending on the brush configuration), and add the tiles to the Swatches panel.

Create a brush

  1. For scatter and art brushes, select the artwork you want to use. For pattern brushes, you can select the artwork for the side tile, but it isn’t necessary.
  2. Click the New Brush button  in the Brushes panel. Alternatively, drag the selected artwork to the Brushes panel.
  3. Select the type of brush you want to create, and click OK.
  4. In the Brush Options dialog box, enter a name for the brush, set brush options, and click OK.

Modify a brush

  • To change the options for a brush, double-click the brush in the Brushes panel. Set the brush options and click OK. If the current document contains brushed paths that use the modified brush, a message appears. Click Apply To Strokes to change pre-existing strokes. Click Leave Strokes to leave pre-existing strokes unchanged, and apply the modified brush to new strokes only.
  • To change the artwork used by a scatter, art, or pattern brush, drag the brush into your artwork and make the changes you want. Then Alt‑drag (Windows) or Option-drag (Mac OS) the modified brush onto the original brush in the Brushes panel.
  • To modify a brushed line without updating the corresponding brush, select the line and click the Options Of Selected Object button  in the Brushes panel.