Adobe Illustrator CS2 supports several additional drawing pen options for the Wacom Intuos3 tablet. With the Intuous3 tablet connected, you can define not only pressure, but also settings that respond to Stylus Wheel, Tilt, Bearing, and Rotation—features available with the Intuous3 pen. Your available options will depend on the driver [...]
If you are drawing with a tablet, such as a Wacom tablet, you can select drawing tools like the Pencil, Pen, brushes, or shapes tools, and draw freehand using your tablet. By tweaking Pencil tool smoothness settings, you’ll probably find the Pencil tool and a tablet the closet thing in Illustrator [...]
Pattern brushes are the most complicated to modify or create because they involve as many as five different object panels. You can use separate symbols for the start, finish, side (center), inside corner, and outside corner panels.
To get inspiration and also to see how it’s done, take a look at preset [...]
Scatter brushes are intuitively named. They scatter a pattern along a path. Thinking of a leaf-blower being pushed across a lawn gives you a sense of the chaos you can generate by using a scatter brush stroke to create a path of objects.
This Won’t Work: Scatter brushes cannot include artwork with gradients, [...]
Art brushes stretch to the length of any path to which they are applied. Normally you create your own art brush, and then bend it, stretch it, or squeeze it onto any path. The same art brush can be applied to a long or short stroke.
Art Brush No-No’s: You can create an [...]
Calligraphy is the art of drawing stylized type that looks like it was scribed with an ink pen or paintbrush. Calligraphic brush strokes can vary in size, angle, shape, and randomness (variety) in the brush stroke width.
Stroke shape can range from almost round to very flat, or anything in between. They [...]
As noted in the introduction to this chapter, there are two ways to use the Paintbrush tool. You can draw with the brushes, or you can apply them to existing strokes.
Drawing with the Paintbrush tool is similar to drawing with the Pencil tool. The main difference is that drawing with the Paintbrush [...]
The heart of Illustrator is the ability to define vector paths, usually using the Pen or Pencil tool. The paths can have an infinite variety of fills, stroke properties, and other effects. Among these effects is an amazing variety of brushlike stroke attributes. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to draw [...]
To fill text with a photo and keep the text editable, place an image into Illustrator (File>Place), then create some text with the Type tool (T) and position it on top of the photo. With the Selection tool, select both the photo and the type, and from [...]
You can use Illustrator’s Eyedropper tool to load the attributes of existing objects quickly. This can be useful in two ways. First, if you already have an object selected when you click another object with the Eyedropper tool, your selected object changes to match the object you clicked. Second, you can [...]