Designing a Poster with Custom Brushes in Illustrator

Practice creating and applying custom brushes in Illustrator while designing a full-size, Sherlock Holmes–inspired poster.

It's easier to learn a new skill when you're designing something fun! In this course, you'll learn the ins and outs of creating and using custom brushes in Illustrator, while designing a full-size, Sherlock Holmes–inspired poster. Author Kevin Stohlmeyer walks through scanning the source materials, transforming them into Illustrator brushes, and then using them to create the final print-ready poster design.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know
• Using the exercise files

1. Scanning Traditional Media

• Creating clean source materials
• Scanning and cleanup
• Setting up your raster source files
• Importing raster source files
• Running Image Trace

2. Creating Brushes

• Creating an art brush
• Creating a pattern brush
• Creating symbol textures

3. Refining Brushes

• Setting color and tint
• Customizing brushes for Wacom tablets
• Saving your brushes and symbols

4. Creating a Poster

• Sketching using pencil brushes
• Building your design with markers
• Adding texture with objects
• Adding text to your poster design
• Making your poster print ready

Conclusion

• Next steps