Colorburned » Illustrator Brushes

Screencast: How to Edit an Existing Pattern Swatch in Illustrator

Grant Friedman — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:49:32 +0000

When you work with patterns in Illustrator you will find that you are constantly having to tweak them in one way or another. This is because sometimes color schemes or elements in the pattern change for one reason or another. Since recreating the pattern from scratch would be time-consuming, you will need to learn how to make quick edits to your patterns directly from the swatches palette. This brief tutorial will explain how to edit an existing pattern swatch in Illustrator.

Video Tutorial

Screenshot

33 More Paint Brush Style Illustrator Brushes

Grant Friedman — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:29:43 +0000

Recently I re-released a set of popular paint brush style Illustrator brushes on this site. After doing so, it didn’t take long before requests for more brushes in that style started pouring in. I love feedback from my readers so I was happy to produce more brushes in that style. So today, I am releasing a set of 33 paint brush style Illustrator brushes for you guys to use in your designs for free. I hope you enjoy them! And don’t forget, I love feedback so feel free to comment and let me know what you think about this set of brushes.

Download these brushes
33 More Paint Brush Style Illustrator Brushes | 210 KB

57 Multi-Colored Illustrator Paint Brushes

Grant Friedman — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:00:54 +0000

Last week I teamed up with my friend Ryan Putnam of Vectips to work on a set of exclusive multi-colored Illustrator brushes that he could give away on his site for free. In exchange for the brushes, Ryan was kind enough to create a phenomenal “Tweet This” icon for this site. Yesterday, Ryan released the set of 57 Multi-Colored Illustrator Paint Brushes that I created for you guys can use in your work for free. So head on over to Vectips and download this incredible set of brushes. They are very realistic and a lot of fun to play with!

85 Illustrator Paint Brushes

Grant Friedman — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:40:57 +0000

This set of 85 Illustrator paint brushes is a remake of some brushes that I previously released on this site. Since releasing these brushes, I’ve received quite a few emails from people who have had some difficulty opening or downloading them. The reason for this is that they were not contained within a zip file, nor were they saved for legacy versions of Illustrator. So instead of updating the files one by one, I decided to combine all 4 sets into one and save them back as an Illustrator brush file and then re-release them to you guys. Enjoy!

Download these brushes
85 Vector Paint Brushes | 0.99 MB

Stars & Stripes: Patriotic Brushes & Swatches

Grant Friedman — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:51:48 +0000

I’ve been feeling a bit patriotic lately so I decided to have a bit of fun and release a set of patriotic brushes and swatches with a “stars & stripes” theme. I will be honest with you; this set isn’t all that innovative. There really aren’t very many ways to display star and stripe patterns. That’s why most political and patriotic designs look practically the same; with a few notable exceptions. I released this set because I think it can save you guys a little time the next time you have to create a patriotic design.

Included in this set are 2 files; an Illustrator Swatch file and an Illustrator Brush file, both of which are compatible with Illustrator CS and above. I hope you all enjoy! Go America! YAH!

Swatch Previews

Brush Previews

Download these files

Stars & Stripes: Patriotic Brushes & Swatches | 134 KB

Installation and Instructions
To learn how to install and how to work with a pattern swatch follow this tutorial.

More Pattern Swatches
Download more Pattern Swatches.

100 Wonderful Water Color Illustrator Brushes

Grant Friedman — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:04:57 +0000

A few months back I released four sets of water color Illustrator brushes [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 ]. Those sets quickly became some of the coolest and most popular freebies on this site. It actually took quite a bit of trial and error to get those sets to look the way I wanted, but in the process I created a few extra sets that I decided not to release at the time. After some thought however, I decided to revisit those brush sets and see if they were worth releasing. As it turns out, they were actually pretty cool because these brushes were created using a different technique than the others; they actually have a few advantages over the other sets. For instance, the other sets work really well on white backgrounds but not as well on darker ones. This set, in contrast, works really well on white backgrounds as well as darker ones.

To use these brushes in Illustrator you will first need to download the zip file, save it to your hard drive and unzip it. Once unzipped, open up your brush palette in Illustrator and in the fly out menu select Open Brush Library > Other Library > and locate the Illustrator file on your hard drive. To use these brushes you must be using Illustrator CS and above. Once you have the brush file open, you can start applying these brushes to your lines and shapes.

Tweet this post: 100 Wonderful Water Color Illustrator Brushes http://tinyurl.com/8myayu

Download the brush file
100 Wonderful Water Color Brushes | 2.62 MB

More Brushes
Download more Illustrator brushes.

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10 Arrowhead Brushes for Illustrator

Grant Friedman — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:46:57 +0000

If you have ever tried to create arrows in Illustrator you probably know that there are a lot of ways it can be done. If you’ve ever explored some of the menus in Illustrator you probably have noticed quite a few options that allow you to create arrows rather quickly. The problem is that each option has some pros and cons. For instance, if you need a quick arrow, you can create one from scratch using basic shapes. This is pretty easy to do but if you need a lot of them it can become rather inefficient. Another way to do it is to do so by adding effects to paths. You can do this by going to Effects > Stylize > Add Arrowheads. This is a fairly decent way of adding arrowheads to lines but this too can be time-consuming and cumbersome if you are adding arrowheads to lots of lines in an illustration.

You may also have noticed a couple of art brush sets that ship with Illustrator. These work great unless you need your arrows to have corners tiles. As you may have noticed, art brushes don’t do corners that well. Pattern brushes however can. That’s why I decided to create a set of 10 arrowhead pattern brushes for Illustrator. These brushes will enable you to quickly draw arrows in Illustrator with very few draw backs. I hope you enjoy them and can use them in your designs.

Download the brush file
10 Arrowhead Brushes | 65 KB

More Brushes
Download more Illustrator brushes.

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50 Snowflake Scatter Brushes

Grant Friedman — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 21:49:26 +0000

I just wanted to let you guys know about another exclusive set of Illustrator brushes that I designed for VECTORTUTS. For the last couple of months, VECTORTUTS has been releasing exclusive vector freebies on their site. I was lucky enough to design the first set of freebies that they released and am once again happy to have designed this set of 50 Snowflake Scatter brushes. So browse on over to VECTORTUTS and check out this set of snowflakes. They are perfect for your holiday designs!

81 Amazing Argyle Illustrator Brushes

Grant Friedman — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:13:12 +0000

When I released my set of 50 Astonishing Illustrator Swatches last week I was really happy with how they turned out and really excited about the response that I received but as I was doing some shopping last weekend, I realized that there was something missing in that set.

As I was browsing the shop I was in I noticed that many of the argyle sweaters in the shop weren’t completely covered in argyle. In fact, some had just one argyle stripe across the chest. This got me thinking; why not design a set of argyle brushes? That would certainly allow you guys to easily create argyle strips.

To make a long story short, I created this set loosely from the swatch palette that I created last week. I used the basic patterns and the color schemes to set up the brushes but I had to make a considerable amount of modifications in order to get the vectors to repeat horizontally. I hope you guys enjoy this set of brushes. You can use them in any number of ways including fashion design, textiles, package design and of course, graphic and web design.

Download the brush file
81 Argyle Illustrator Brushes | 363 KB

VECTORTUTS Freebie: Exclusive Illustrator Watercolor Brushes

Grant Friedman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:30:23 +0000

In the first of an upcoming series of free vector downloads, Vectortuts released a set of exclusive water color Illustrator brushes on their site today. This is very exciting for a number of reasons. First, Vectortuts is one of the best vector design websites on the net; it is very cool that they are offering free high quality vectors for us to use. Secondly, out of all the designers out there, they chose to partner with me to release their first set.

So browse on over to Vectortuts and try out these free brushes for yourself, they similar to the water color brushes that I have made in the past. The main difference is that in this set, I used one color per brush stroke instead of many colors like the previous sets. This should give you some more flexibility in your designs.