Illustrator CC is the seventeenth edition of Illustrator which is an editor of vector graphics developed by Adobe Systems. It has been released with Creative Cloud which the first service model is having subscription based. Now users can have more benefits in it. Now brush definitions can contain images or hold them in non-vector artworks. Scatter, patterns and art brushes can be defined now by making Bitmap Images as Custom Brushes in Illustrator CC.
How to Use Bitmap Images as Custom Brushes in Illustrator CC
The best news for Illustrator CC users is any image can be used as a custom brush which can be embedded in a raw file of Illustrator. There are many types of brushes in Illustrator, but those which support images as brushes are Art, Scatter and Pattern.
Working with it was never so easy like just drag and drop. Press F5 to open the Brush Panel. Drag Bitmap image into the Brushes panel. To create Bitmap Images as Custom Brushes in Illustrator there you need to choose any one type of Art, Scatter or Pattern type. You should have a basic knowledge about creating or modifying brushes or you can have more knowledge about it in Internet.
Images can be bent, stretched, or scaled according to the size and shape of the stroke which a designer makes with its brush. Any type of stroke can be used for this purpose. The good thing is these brushes behave the way you modify them using the Brush Dialog options, just like the other brushes.
For better performance use smaller bitmap images in brushes in Illustrator CC. Bigger images ask you to allow the brush rasterizing the image to lower resolutions before creating the brush.
When you practically implement these custom brushes with the help of bitmap images you will mark the different scale options are used by each of the strokes such as:
- Original image
- An image with a brush, stretched to fit stroke length
- An image with a brush, scaled proportionately
- An image with a brush, stretched between guides
What you get to know from these outputs when such a type of image is used in Illustrator CC are
- Use of large image reduces performance on both speed and quality.
- Directly Bitmap images cannot be used.
- In case of bitmap image usage, rasterizing of bitmap images to grayscale is really necessary before it is used in a brush.
If there are any Bitmap Images as Custom Brushes in Illustrator then it will prompt you to convert it to grayscale format. Then you can easily create the brush successfully.