Introduction to the picture brush

Narration transcript

Hello everyone, this simple tutorial is about the picture brush. In order to use the picture brush we'll need some pictures. Switch to the Online page and then to the Media tab. Find the media pack named 'Nature mix' and click on Download. Wait until the pack is installed.

Switch back to the Create page and create a new image. Set its width to 800 pixels, height to 600 pixels and background color to white.

Now, switch to the brush tool and find its configuration panel. Click on the small button with 3 dots. Select the picture of a seashell - you'll find it in the media library. Set the brush size to about 50 pixels.

Start drawing a fish. I suck at drawing and so I am sure you can draw a better fish than me. Note that the fish shape is composed of seashells. That's the picture brush at work.

The picture brush has 3 new settings that influence how are the pictures placed along the drawn path. Scatter randomly positions the pictures, Rotate randomly rotates them and Resize randomly changes their size. Experiment with these setting. This is scattering and this is resizing, it is not very apparent.

Now let's look on the picture brush itself. Close the file and open the sealshell.rli from the Tagged media library. As you can see, it is an ordinary animated image. Any picture you want may be used as
a picture brush.

If animation is used, one frame is randomly picked every time a picture is drawn. The frame duration influences how often is a particular frame used. Longer frame duration means frame is used more often. This big seashell has short frame duration and so it is used very rarely.

You can create your onw picture brushes and if you want to share them with the community, send them to me and I'll publish them on the Online page.

Thanks for watching.