This brush makes handy “western” style text, borders and other things (it’s actually quite versatile). I always forget to save them and end up rebuilding them every time, so today upon a social media request I thought I’d do a short tutorial of the process that I use to create a vector rope brush.
I usually work with a pretty big canvas, and sometimes end up making it bigger depending on how well I’ve set up the brush. For this I’ve set my canvas to 30″ by 30″
Take your rectangle tool (M) make a rectangle, and then adjust two points so that it looks something like the image here.
Duplicate your rectangle by holding alt, clicking and dragging it so that it slightly overlaps itself. Then repeat that transformation by ctrl/cmd+D
Line up your rope with the center horizontally button and a guide if needed, drag it into your brushes window and select “art brush.”
These settings can be a bit tricky, you can either stretch the rope or scale it proportionately (which will be large on longer strokes.) Depending on what you’re working on “Stretch to fit Stroke Length” works well.
Select your brush and grab your brush tool with (b), have fun creating 😉
