Jeremy Slagle was the arty kid who tried his hand at every craft—he was in wood shop, ceramics, and designed posters for the theater department. By the time he was old enough to go to art school, he decided to skip it and stay the course of a self-taught designer. Today he heads up an eponymous brand studio, Slagle Design, creating everything from packaging to sports mascots.
“I’m a vector nerd,” he says, referencing the infinitely scalable artworks created in Adobe Illustrator. “You can blow them up to the size of the state of Texas and not lose any detail. So many of the things I create might end up on a billboard or the center of a basketball court.”
Among Jeremy’s side passions are children’s books. He has illustrated two of them and challenged himself during the process to create analog-looking artwork within Illustrator. To do this, he learned to make custom brushes that add a handmade quality to precise shape and line work. He now creates and sells custom brush sets and teaches brush-making workshops.
We asked Jeremy to create a textural brush pack for Illustrator that gives big, gritty results. Inspired by the pebbled skin of rhinoceri at his local zoo, Slagle made them by dipping things like moss and acorns in ink before digitizing the results. Grab his brush pack above and follow along below to learn how to make your own custom brushes.
STEP 1/7
Import and paint.
Download Jeremy’s file above and open it in Illustrator. You’ll see his regal rhino family in the first artboard, and beneath that, an artboard with all seven of his custom texture brushes. To use them in your own artwork, simply click on any brush with the Selection tool, and copy (Ctrl/Cmd+C) and paste (Ctrl/Cmd+V) into your own file. As soon as the brush is pasted, it will show up in your Brush panel (Window > Brushes). Now you can delete the brush swatch from your artboard and select the brush from your panel to start creating.
STEP 2/7
Make and place.
Now that you’ve been inspired by Jeremy’s creations, try making your own. First, create a mark you think would translate to a good brush style. Jeremy dipped natural materials like leather, acorns, and moss in black ink and dragged them across paper to make his brush marks. You could use watercolor, markers, your fingers—the possibilities are infinite. Snap a photo of your brush mark and open it in Illustrator. With the image selected, click the Image Trace button in the options bar.
STEP 3/7
Tidy the trace.
Once traced, click on the Image Trace panel icon in the Options bar and start making adjustments. Set the mode to Black and White, uncheck Snap Curves to Lines (an option best for geometric shapes) and check Ignore White to ensure your brush is made only of the dark parts. Now you can refine the appearance. Check the Preview box so you can see the changes before applying them. Threshold controls the denseness of your brush, Paths the roughness or smoothness, Corners the jaggedness and softness of points, and Noise will raise or lower the amount of granular details. Once you’re satisfied with the look, click Trace. Finally, click Expand in the Options bar.
STEP 4/7
Brush up.
Select your brush and drag it into the Brushes panel. (Note that whatever size your brush is when you drag it in is the size it will appear at 1px, so you may want to size it down either with the Selection or Transform tool.) You’ll be prompted to decide what kind of brush you want to make. Scatter and Art Brushes are common choices. Scatter is best suited for textural brushes, while Art is ideal for painterly ones—just like in Jeremy’s brush set. Once you’ve selected your brush type, you’ll be given the option to name your brush and adjust the settings. For now, just name it, set the Method to Tints, and click Ok. (Tints allows you to change the color of your brush later.)
STEP 5/7
Refine a Scatter Brush.
Draw a line, select it, and click on the brush to apply it. You’ll see the brush tip repeated over and over. To fix this, double-click the brush in the Brushes panel to open the Brush Options box. Again, check Preview to experiment with the settings before finalizing them. First, change the size to random. This will vary the size of the repeated brush tip, but it won’t be larger or smaller than the percentages set.
Next, adjust the Spacing, which tells the repeating brush tips how much to overlap, creating that continuous look. The Scatter setting offsets brush tips above and below the path for a variegated look. (The Leather brush is set to zero; check out the Acorn brush for an example of adjusted Scatter.) Finally, set the Rotation to 180 degrees and -180 degrees so that it will randomly rotate 180 degrees in each direction. Once satisfied, click Ok. You can always re-edit a brush by double-clicking on it in the Brushes panel.
STEP 6/7
Refine an Art Brush.
After you drag and drop your resized Art Brush into the Brush panel, double-click it to open up the Brush Options box as you did before. Art Brushes typically require much less adjustment than Scatter brushes. The default settings for Width, Brush Scale Options, Direction, and Overlap can usually go untouched, but make sure to change the Method to Tints before you click Ok. Your brush is ready! Of course, feel free to experiment with the settings. Choosing Stretch Between Guides, for instance, will allow you choose the portion of a brush that stretches, while leaving parts of it, such as the tips, unstretched.
STEP 7/7
More tips from Jeremy.
You can maximize your assets by making two brushes out of one brush tip, says Jeremy. Simply toggle the Threshold within the Image Trace panel dramatically to the Less or More sides to create very different looks.
Once you’ve applied a brush to a line, keep clicking the brush within the Brush panel to randomize your results until you land on something you like.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
As principal of his own firm, Slagle Design, Jeremy Slagle puts his insatiable curiosity to work every day as he gets into the heads of his clients to really understand what it is they want and need in order to develop a memorable brand presence. With a firm belief that he is the master of his computer (and not the other way around), he works everything out on paper first to ensure that the logos he designs and the brands he creates are as thoughtful, effective, and original as the clients they represent. Jeremy lives in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio with his wife Becky, two teenagers, and a miniature poodle.
