Gina Carvallo
Create a Fancy Rope Brush In Illustrator. In this tutorial we’ll create a custom pattern brush that can be used to draw cool, comic style ropes in Illustrator. We’ll make heavy use of the Pathfinder tool while working on the individual shapes and of course you will learn how to create brushes in Illustrator.
The rope brush can then be applied to any path and shape in any size needed. The Final Rope Brush In Action Creating The Pattern Brush Open a new document in Illustrator and grab the Rounded Rectangle Tool. Draw a vertical line on top of the shape, select both the line and the shape and hit the Divide button from the Pathfinder window. Ungroup the resulting object by hitting cmd+g, then place the the right half on top the left half, select both and unite the shapes via the Pathfinder window.
Hold down the shift key and rotate the shape clockwise by 45°. Set the color of the resulting shape to a lighter brown and hit cmd+b to paste another copy of the basic shape in the back. Let’s add a thin outline to the current object.