Tips and Tricks: Creating Your Own Grunge Brush

Although I have experimented with the grunge brush library in illustrator, I can never get quite the effect I was looking for. That is, until I found this awesome tutorial to make your own grunge brush. To begin, I would say the hardest part of this tutorial, is finding a picture of the texture you wish to achieve and apply—any image will work as long as it’s large enough. Next, desaturate the photo by going to: imageà adjustmentsà desaturate. Play with the levels until you are left with a section that you think would work for your brush. Do not over de-saturate—you want to maintain some of the gray or else it will just come out speckled. Use either the lasso tool or the pen tool to select the desired area, cut and paste as a new layer and delete the original layer so you are only left with the selection (you can also do this by selecting the inverse after the selection has been made and pressing delete to erase everything besides your selection). Now, click the eraser from the toolbox and change the brush to the rough, round bristle brush from the brushes palette. Clean up the edges of your selection so there are no visible boarders. Next, select the entire layer and go to edit: define brush preset. Make sure to name your brush so you can find it easily next time you want to use it. To test your self-made grunge brush, choose a color and select the brush tool and began “grunging” up your document or photo!For step by step photos, please visit the original blog where this tutorial was discovered: http://veerlev2.duoh.com/blog/comments/creating_grunge_brushes/

Please let us know if you have any other suggestions for creating custom brushes in illustrator!

Written by: Karly Poole