Brush Strokes: Making Natural Pen and Ink Drawings
Brush Strokes: Making Natural Pen and Ink Drawings
by Sharon Steuer © 1999
Editor's note
To view the pages as Sharon designed them, you can download a PDF version of this story.
Overview
Adjust the Paintbrush Tool settings; customize a Calligraphic Brush; trace or draw your composition; make final adjustments.
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It's easy to create spontaneous painterly and calligraphic marks in Illustrator--perhaps easier than in any other graphics program. Creating highly variable, responsive strokes (using a graphics tablet and a pressure-sensitive, pen-like stylus), you can now edit those strokes as paths, or experiment with applying different brushes to the strokes after the path has been made. This illustration, one of 150 figures I drew for Christina Sillari's teaching manual on Chakra Yoga, was created using one custom Calligraphy Brush and a Wacom ArtZ tablet.
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If you'll be working from a source, prepare your template. Although you can draw directly into the computer, if you want to trace a sketch or a scan you'll need to prepare your template. For this series of illustrations, since the charcoal drawings were between 11" x 17" and 18" x 24", I took digital snapshots of the drawings instead of scanning. The grayscale TIFF version of this posture "Easy Pose" was then placed as a template into Illustrator (see pages 80 Ð 83 for template help). To toggle between hiding and showing the template, press
-Shift-W.
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To create a custom brush, select a Calligraphic Brush, click the New Brush icon and click OK to New Calligraphy Brush. Experiment with various settings, name your brush and click OK. For this series of yoga illustrations, I named the Calligraphic brush "6 pt oval" with settings of: Angle 60° , Random 180°, Roundness 60%, Pressure 40%, Diameter 6pt, Pressure 6pt. The Paintbrush is now set to use your current stroke color--if there is no stroke color, it will use the fill color! Now draw. If you don't like a mark, either choose Undo or use the Direct-selection tool to edit the path. (If you don't have a pressure-sensitive tablet, you may want to try Random as a variable in Brush Options, since Pressure won't have any effect.) |
