- Drawing a Quick Calligraphic Brush Stroke
- Stepping Back: Four Types of Paintbrushes and How to Apply Them
- Defining Pressure-Sensitive Calligraphic Brushes for Tablets
- Creating Custom Calligraphic Brushes
- Creating Custom Art Brushes
- Creating Scatter Paintbrushes
- Working with Pattern Brushes
- Wrapping Up
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Defining Pressure-Sensitive Calligraphic Brushes for Tablets
If you’re using a drawing tablet with Illustrator, you can define pressure (and other) attributes that control how a calligraphic brush will respond to the pressure and tilting of your drawing tablet pen. Double-click a calligraphic brush in the Brushes panel to open the Calligraphic Brush Options dialog box. From the Angle, Roundness, or Diameter pop-up, choose Pressure or another tablet-based stroke attribute.
Various drawing tablet options appear, depending on the tablet you’re using, the version of the tablet, and drivers you install. (These come with your drawing tablet.) The Wacom 6D Art Pen set, for example, can support six dimensions of pressure sensitivity: x axis, y axis, pressure, tilt, bearing, and barrel rotation. Once you choose Pressure (or another option) from any of the three pop-ups, you can define how much variation you want to allow. A large variation value for diameter, for instance, makes strokes applied with more pressure on your tablet much thicker than strokes applied with slight pressure.