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Latest discovery - Adobe Illustrator brushes

October 1st, 2008 at 6:20 pm

LAAAAA! That’s the musical note sung with vibrato as the kind of sound that would trumpet with the gates of Heaven opening up, like the way I just opened up a whole new world in Adobe Illustrator! I use Illustrator in very crude fashion to draw out handbag sketches, and I pretty much know only the basics of how to use it. But TODAY I discovered the Brush Library!!! Why didn’t anyone ever tell me about this treasure trove before?!

It all started when I read about Google celebrating its 10th birthday by re-releasing their search index as it was back in 2001. I thought, “Wow, 10th birthday already?” Then, “What day is it today?” Followed by, “Omigosh, it’s October already! And it’s even starting to feel like fall!” All of which led me to think that ooh maybe I should seasonalize my blog header like Google does! Of course they do it for holidays and other special occasions too but me, I could at least do it for seasons.

But dangit, I can’t draw. So I did a few searches for “free clip art maple leaf” and other such variations, but those didn’t get me very far. Then I recalled finding a cool article during my wedding planning days on how to draw a bamboo stalk in Illustrator. That was pretty cool, so I searched for “draw maple leaf illustrator” and wound up with this swell tutorial. But that was too much work…and THEN! Then I found Illustrator Brush Basics. I could draw leaves galore at the click of a mouse! And so I did! Three falling leaves in my little header. =} Here’s an excerpt of the how-to:

Easy as pie! I’d never gotten past the 6 default brushes that show up in my Brushes window, so I had no IDEA I had all those brushes at my disposal! I’m giddy just thinking about it.

Not only that, but a) BioRUST.com has a bunch of other Illustrator tutorials, and b) this all led me to discover BittBox.com, which has loads of how-to’s AND free downloads of all kinds of Illustrator brushes!!! Here are two that have got me a little bit excited: