Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Expressing Text as an Art Brush

Adobe characterizes art brushes and the other brush styles as paint-

ing tools. I prefer to think of them as a means of distorting artwork

to fi t a path. And if that’s not enough, you can bring to bear pres-

sure and width information, which are options elsewhere unavail-

able inside Illustrator (not to mention, ones that I very much envy

when working in Photoshop and other graphics programs).

Once you begin thinking of brushes as distor-

tion tools, it frees you from imagining a brush

to be simply a brush. Granted, an art brush can

resemble a traditional brushstroke. As illustrated

in Figure 9-33, however, it may also be a crude

scribble, an ornate arrow, a woodcut banner, the

silhouette of an aquatic mammal, or a consistently

spaced and regularly oriented passage of type.

An art brush is actually a graphic—that is, any-

thing you can draw—traced along a path. The

trick is to start with a graphic rendered along a

linear horizon. (For example, I drew the origi-

nal humpback whale from Figure 9-33 with its

mouth and tail along a more or less even keel, as

in Figure 9-34.) When expressed as an art brush,

the graphic blossoms into a living, squirming,

breathing element of your design. The path is

the vertebra, the brush is the vertebrate. Or put

more simply: The brush fl exes along the path’s

infi nitely fl exible spine.

In this exercise, we’ll experiment